Micro Benchmarks

We use Go’s native tools to write targeted micro-benchmarks in performance sensitive areas. Our main goal with this approach is to provide easy-to-use micro-benchmarks that developers can use to perform quick before/after performance comparisons for their changes.

See the sample micro-benchmark for Mixer that measures the performance of attribute processing code.

The developers can also utilize a golden-files approach to capture the state of their benchmark results in the source tree for keeping track and referencing purposes. GitHub has this baseline file.

Due to the nature of this testing type, there is a high-variance in latency numbers across machines. It is recommended that micro-benchmark numbers captured in this way are compared only against the previous runs on the same machine.

The perfcheck.sh script can be used to quickly run benchmarks in a sub-folder and compare its results against the co-located baseline files.