node/benchmark/README.md

Node.js Core Benchmarks

This folder contains code and data used to measure performance of different Node.js implementations and different ways of writing JavaScript run by the built-in JavaScript engine.

For a detailed guide on how to write and run benchmarks in this directory, see the guide on benchmarks.

Table of Contents

• File tree structure
• Common API

File tree structure

Directories

Benchmarks testing the performance of a single node submodule are placed into a directory with the corresponding name, so that they can be executed by submodule or individually. Benchmarks that span multiple submodules may either be placed into the misc directory or into a directory named after the feature they benchmark. E.g. benchmarks for various new ECMAScript features and their pre-ES2015 counterparts are placed in a directory named es. Fixtures that are not specific to a certain benchmark but can be reused throughout the benchmark suite should be placed in the fixtures directory.

Other Top-level files

The top-level files include common dependencies of the benchmarks and the tools for launching benchmarks and visualizing their output. The actual benchmark scripts should be placed in their corresponding directories.

• _benchmark_progress.js: implements the progress bar displayed when running compare.js
• _cli.js: parses the command line arguments passed to compare.js, run.js and scatter.js
• _cli.R: parses the command line arguments passed to compare.R
• _http-benchmarkers.js: selects and runs external tools for benchmarking the http subsystem.
• bar.R: R script for visualizing the output of benchmarks with bar plots.
• common.js: see Common API.
• compare.js: command line tool for comparing performance between different Node.js binaries.
• compare.R: R script for statistically analyzing the output of compare.js
• run.js: command line tool for running individual benchmark suite(s).
• scatter.js: command line tool for comparing the performance between different parameters in benchmark configurations, for example to analyze the time complexity.
• scatter.R: R script for visualizing the output of scatter.js with scatter plots.

Common API

The common.js module is used by benchmarks for consistency across repeated tasks. It has a number of helpful functions and properties to help with writing benchmarks.

createBenchmark(fn, configs[, options])

See the guide on writing benchmarks.

default_http_benchmarker

The default benchmarker used to run HTTP benchmarks. See the guide on writing HTTP benchmarks.

PORT

The default port used to run HTTP benchmarks. See the guide on writing HTTP benchmarks.

sendResult(data)

Used in special benchmarks that can't use createBenchmark and the object it returns to accomplish what they need. This function reports timing data to the parent process (usually created by running compare.js, run.js or scatter.js).