The New Phoronix Test Suite Grapher Has Landed

Now within the latest Phoronix-Test-Suite on GitHub the new graphing code is utilized by default. This will directly benefit Phoronix Test Suite users but will also be beneficial to those simply reading Phoronix articles or visiting OpenBenchmarking.org and LinuxBenchmarking.com.

If you already haven't read, first see the earlier parts: Viewing Our Performance Trackers Should Now Be Much Faster, RFC: Polishing Up The Result Graphs, and Color-Coding Graphs To Match Brands Being Benchmarked.

I'm ~95% done with the low-level changes to the graph/result handling and the new version of pts_Graph is now enabled by default within the latest Git code. Besides allowing other features to be opened up moving forward (such as the color-coding by brand as implemented this week and allowing for new analytical passes and other features to be added), the new process is much faster, consumes a lot less memory, and also is emitting more optimized SVG graphs.

Using the phoronix-test-suite debug-render-test that is a self-benchmark of the result parsing and graph rendering tasks for 300,000 real-world benchmark results taken from the LinuxBenchmarking.com data-set, I did some reference comparison tests today.

With Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.1, the latest stable release from earlier this year, the test took 236 seconds and had a peak memory use of 905MB. When running the Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 Git code that's using the new result parsing/handling but the old pts_Graph grapher, the same process on the same system took 142 seconds while consuming 654MB... A nice improvement for dealing with 300k benchmark results. However, with making use of the latest Git defaults that now has the new graphing code (phx-graph merged back into pts_Graph), this same test on the system took just 55 seconds and consumed just 230MB of memory.

Compared to the current stable release, Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 right now is riding more than four times faster and consuming 25% the amount of RAM. Additionally, the size of the generated result graphs are on average 30% the size of what's found in the current stable release. These huge breakthroughs are due to rewriting large parts of the result parsing and merging code, with a lot of that code having not been touched since pre-1.0 Phoronix Test Suite. For most Phoronix Test Suite users just running the program casually, you won't notice much difference if you're just playing around with a few results, but enterprise users analyzing large data-sets should now see big improvements. The SVG graph size reduction is through pts_Graph now emitting more optimized SVG/XML while still retaining compatibility for converting it back to PNG graphs when exporting to PDF files or for older web browsers.

With the next version of OpenBenchmarking.org, due out in tandem with Phoronix Test Suite 6.0, the result viewing will now be much faster plus the new code will make it easier to open up a lot of new features. The smaller SVG files will lead to a faster experience on OpenBenchmarking, LinuxBenchmarking.com, and while viewing Phoronix articles.

Now that this big underlying project is nearly complete (just finishing some things up and tweaking things and testing with more results data), stay tuned for more details on other Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 / OpenBenchmarking.org features ahead.