Test Automation With PTS, OpenBenchmarking.org

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Test Automation With PTS, OpenBenchmarking.org

Tonight at the Ubuntu Developer Summit I'm talking about the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Here's some of my notes for those unable to make it or were able to attend but would like additional information...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA5OTg

[uid313]

Charts are unreadable when comparing more than 2 or 3 things because the colors all look similar.

Intel = blue
AMD = red
Nvidia = green

Make color represent the company by their trademark color.

Make port to Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Make GUI and self-hosted PHP server via functionality in PHP 5.4.

[Michael]

Charts are unreadable when comparing more than 2 or 3 things because the colors all look similar.

Intel = blue
AMD = red
Nvidia = green

Make color represent the company by their trademark color.

I don't want a static database of colors hard-coded into PTS, that's the problem. And in terms of why some colors are turning out close to eachother is there's a flaw in the color shifting/picking algorithm that no one has yet figured out how to improve.

Make GUI and self-hosted PHP server via functionality in PHP 5.4.

There is already something similar to this in-development that I'll be announcing soon.

[uid313]

I don't want a static database of colors hard-coded into PTS, that's the problem. And in terms of why some colors are turning out close to eachother is there's a flaw in the color shifting/picking algorithm that no one has yet figured out how to improve.

Usually I don't hardcode stuff either, because it is often considered bad code practice.
I think the algorithm needs to be improved, but also a load an external hardcoded configuration files, because some colors are strongely assiocated with certain brands.

HSL could be used to pick a color, it is much easier to work programatically with HSL than it is with RGB.

[Michael]

Usually I don't hardcode stuff either, because it is often considered bad code practice.
I think the algorithm needs to be improved, but also a load an external hardcoded configuration files, because some colors are strongely assiocated with certain brands.

HSL could be used to pick a color, it is much easier to work programatically with HSL than it is with RGB.

I already convert it to HSL but something still isn't right. Any patches are welcome, it's simple in ~ phoronix-test-suite/pts-core/objects/pts_Graph/pts_Graph.php from 4.0/Git.

[Michael]

We can rotate the hue 360 degrees. However rotating it by 1 degree would not provide enough visual distinction, so we would have to increase it by more than so.

If we benchmark 4 items, we can use 360 / 4 and hence the hue gets rotated by 90 degrees.
But if we have 50 items we benchmark, then 360 / 50 = 7.2 which would not be a hue leap enough to provide visual distinction, so at one point we would have to resort to also changing the color intensity.

But rotating by 45 degrees we could fit 8 hues in 360 degrees. This would be visuablly distinctive. If we need to benchmark more than 8 items, we change the intensity and keep on rotating the hue.

$items_to_benchmark = 16;
$h = 0;
$s = 100;
$l = 50;

if ($items_to_benchmark < 8) {
  $increase_hue_by = (int)(360 / $items_to_benchmark);
} else {
  $increase_hue_by = 45;
}

for ($i=0; $i<$items_to_benchmark; $i++) {
  if ($h == 360) {
    $s -= 33;
    $l += 10;
  }
  $color = 'hsl(' + $h + ',' + $s + '%,' + $l + '%)':
  $h += $increase_hue_by; 
} 

The issue in that design though is not always knowing necessarily (or at least how it's exposed now) how many colors/items are needed prior to declaring the first color. Right now it already shifts after a defined number of times.