[RFC] simulating network properties for benchmarks

Carl Friedrich Bolz cfbolz at gmx.de
Fri Jul 21 14:39:09 BST 2006


Martin Pool wrote:
> On 21 Jul 2006, Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> wrote:
>> Robert Collins wrote:
>>
>>> Heres a prototype of what I was referring to. The decorator in it was
>>> quick-coded, if the future directions I mention in it are to be done, it
>>> would deserve unit tests, as high layer tests could no longer test it at
>>> that point.
>>>
>>> I'm pushing this up to
>>> sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzr/test-sftp-latency now.
>> This is the approach seems pretty natural to me.  But an interesting
>> alternative would be for the transport to not sleep, but instead, move
>> the clock ahead.  That would mean we could simulate slow operations
>> quickly, which would make such tests easier to run.
>>
>> Obviously we can't change the system clock, but we could have the
>> transport update a global variable, and have the bench suite use that
>> for its calculations.
>
> And then basically show it as e.g. "4.2s real time, 123.2s simulated
> IO".  It could be nice.

Shouldn't be too hard to switch between the two (or even have both :-).
Just make it possible to override the function that the proxy socket
uses to sleep.

>
>> The disadvantage is that lsprof won't understand what's going on-- but
>> does sleep show up in lsprof, or does it measure CPU time?
>
> I'm not sure.   I thought it was wall time.

I think so too, yes. I think it would indeed be useful to track the
sleeps with lsprof.

Cheers,

Carl Friedrich




More information about the bazaar mailing list