Changes

0.8.0 (2019-11-12)

  • Fix --min-objects. Previously it did nothing.
  • Add --pack to pack each storage before running.
  • Let the --log option take a path to a ZConfig logging configuration file that will be used to configure logging. This allows fine-grained control over log levels.
  • Add a benchmark (prefetch_cold) to test the effect of bulk prefetching objects into the storage cache.
  • Add a benchmark (readCurrent) to test the speed of using Connection.readCurrent (specifically, to see how well it can parallelize).
  • Add a benchmark (tpc) that explicitly (and only) tests moving through the three phases of a successful transaction commit on a storage.
  • Make pre-loading objects with --min-objects faster by using pre-serialized object data.
  • Increase the default size of objects to 300 bytes, and make it the same on Python 2 and Python 3. This closely matches the measurement of the average object size in a large production database (30 million objects).
  • Add a benchmark for allocating new OIDs. See issue #47.
  • Add a benchmark for conflict resolution, designed to emphasize parallel commit. See issue #46.
  • Add a benchmark focused just on storing new objects, eliminating the pickling and OID allocation from the timing. See issue #49.
  • Enhance the transaction commit benchmarks to show the difference between implicit commit and explicit commit. ZODB makes extra storage calls in the implicit case.
  • Add support for Python 3.8.
  • Allow excluding particular benchmarks on the command line. For example, -cold.
  • When benchmarking multiple ZODB configurations, run a particular benchmark for all databases before moving on to the next benchmark. Previously all benchmarks for a database were run before moving on to the next database. This makes it a bit easier to eyeball results as the process is running.

0.7.0 (2019-05-31)

  • Drop support for Python 3.4.
  • Add support for Python 3.7.
  • The timing loops have been rewritten on top of pyperf. This produces much more reliable/stable, meaningful data with a richer set of statistics information captured, and the ability to do analysis and comparisons on data files captured after a run is complete. Some command line options have changed as a result of this, and the output no longer is in terms of “objects per second” but how long a particular loop operation takes. See issue #37 and issue #35.
  • The timing data for in-process concurrency (gevent and threads) attempts to take the concurrency into account to produce more accurate results. See issue #38.
  • Add debug logging when we think we detect gevent-cooperative and gevent-unaware databases in gevent mode.
  • Add the ability to specify only certain subsets of benchmarks to run on the command line. In particular, if you’ve already run the add benchmark once, you can run other benchmarks such as the cold benchmark again independently as many times as you want (as long as you don’t zap the database; that’s not allowed).
  • The benchmarks more carefully verify that they tested what they wanted to. For example, they check that their Connection’s load count matches what it should be (0 in the case of the “steamin” test).
  • Profiling in gevent mode captures the entire set of data in a single file. See issue #33.
  • The --zap option accepts a force argument to eliminate the prompts. See issue #36.
  • Multi-threaded runs handle exceptions and signals more reliably. Partial fix for issue #26.
  • Shared thread read tests clear the caches of connections and the database in a more controlled way, more closely modeling the expected behaviour. Previously the cache clearing was non-deterministic. See issue #28.
  • When using gevent, use its Event and Queue implementations for better cooperation with the event loop.
  • Add --min-objects option to ensure that the underlying database has at least a set number of objects in place. This lets us test scaling issues and be more repeatable. This is tested with FileStorage, ZEO, and RelStorage (RelStorage 2.1a2 or later is needed for accurate results; earlier versions will add new objects each time, resulting in database growth).
  • Remove the unmaintained buildout configuration. See issue #25.
  • Add an option to test the performance of blob storage. See issue #29.
  • Add support for zapping file storages. See issue #43.
  • When zapping, do so right before running the ‘add’ benchmark. This ensures that the databases are all the same size even when the same underlying storage (e.g., MySQL databas) is used multiple times in a configuration. Previously, the second and further uses of the same storage would not be zapped and so would grow with the data from the previous contender tests. See issue #42.
  • Add a benchmark for empty transaction commits. This tests the storage synchronization — in RelStorage, it tests polling the RDBMS for invalidations. See issue #41.
  • Add support for using vmprof to profile, instead of cProfile. See issue #34.

0.6.0 (2016-12-13)

This is a major release that focuses on providing more options to fine tune the testing process that are expected to be useful to both deployers and storage authors.

A second major focus has been on producing more stable numeric results. As such, the results from this version are not directly comparable to results obtained from a previous version.

Platforms

  • Add support for Python 3 (3.4, 3.5 and 3.6) and PyPy. Remove support for Python 2.6 and below.
  • ZODB 4 and above are the officially supported versions. ZODB 3 is no longer tested but may still work.

Incompatible Changes

  • Remove support for Python 2.6 and below.
  • The old way of specifying concurrency levels with a comma separated list is no longer supported.

Command Line Tool

The help output and command parsing has been much improved.

  • To specify multiple concurrency levels, specify the -c option multiple times. Similarly, to specify multiple object counts, specify the -n option multiple times. (For example, -c 1 -c 2 -n 100 -n 200 would run four comparisons). The old way of separating numbers with commas is no longer supported.
  • Add the --log option to enable process logging. This is useful when using zodbshootout to understand changes in a single storage.
  • Add --zap to rebuild RelStorage schemas on startup. Useful when switching between Python 2 and Python 3.
  • The reported numbers should be more stable, thanks to running individual tests more times (via the --test-reps option) and taking the mean instead of the min.
  • Add --dump-json to write a JSON representation of more detailed data than is present in the default CSV results.

Test Additions

  • Add support for testing with BTrees (--btrees). This is especially helpful for comparing CPython and PyPy, and is also useful for understanding BTree behaviour.
  • Add support for testing using threads instead of multiprocessing (--threads). This is especially helpful on PyPy or when testing concurrency of a RelStorage database driver and/or gevent. Databases may be shared or unique for each thread.
  • Add support for setting the repetition count (--test-reps). This is especially helpful on PyPy.
  • Use randomized data for the objects instead of a constant string. This lets us more accurately model effects due to compression at the storage or network layers.
  • When gevent is installed, add support for testing with the system monkey patched (--gevent). (Note: This might not be supported by all storages.)
  • Add --leaks to use objgraph to show any leaking objects at the end of each test repetition. Most useful to storage and ZODB developers.

Other

  • Enable continuous integration testing on Travis-CI and coveralls.io.
  • Properly clear ZEO caches on ZODB5. Thanks to Jim Fulton.
  • Improve installation with pip. Extras are provided to make testing RelStorage as easy as testing FileStorage and ZEO.
  • The documentation is now hosted at http://zodbshootout.readthedocs.io/

0.5 (2012-09-08)

  • Updated to MySQL 5.1.65, PostgreSQL 9.1.5, memcached 1.4.15, and libmemcached 1.0.10.
  • Moved development to github.

0.4 (2011-02-01)

  • Added the –object-size parameter.

0.3 (2010-06-19)

  • Updated to memcached 1.4.5, libmemcached 0.40, and pylibmc 1.1+.
  • Updated to PostgreSQL 8.4.4.
  • Updated to MySQL 5.1.47 and a new download url - the old was giving 401’s.

0.2 (2009-11-17)

  • Buildout now depends on a released version of RelStorage.

0.1 (2009-11-17)

  • Initial release.