brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance

[Kees Cook]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 07:43:49PM +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Allison Randal wrote on 28/09/10 21:11:
> >
> > The Performance track is about measurable speed improvements and also
> > about snappy, responsive user experience, across all editions of
> > Ubuntu, from older hardware to high-efficiency devices, and from boot
> > experience through common user-facing applications and tools.
> >
> > What's high on your list for this area?
> >...
> 
> Measurement. Where can I go to see the equivalent of Firefox's
> <http://arewefastyet.com/> for Ubuntu startup speed? Where's the
> equivalent graph for Ubiquity? For Unity? For Ubuntu Software Center?
> How much better or worse is yesterday's Natty nightly compared with
> Ubuntu 10.10? With Ubuntu 10.04 LTS?

I'm extremely interested in having the various sub-team come up with
standard measurements so that when people make changes to performance, we
can actually see it across all of these well-defined workloads.

I can think of only one that exists now: the boot-time graphs Scott
manages.

Changes to the compiler toolchain, the kernel, etc, all have an impact on
everyone's workloads, but most teams haven't actually stepped forward and
said "THIS workload is important to us, here's how to reproduce the
measurement, and here's where we're tracking the daily changes to that
measurement."

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Ubuntu Security Team