Bam! Phoromatic 1.0 Unleashed & Ubuntu Joins The Party

Phoromatic, our remote test management system that makes it incredibly simple to deploy the Phoronix Test Suite across an array of systems within an organization or around the world, has been in development for more than a year. We publicly announced this unique enterprise solution when developing Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and it publicly went into beta with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 where it became possible to easily build a benchmarking test farm using our Phoronix software. Before ending out the year we launched Phoromatic Tracker with an initial reference implementation to monitor the Linux kernel performance on a daily basis and in a fully automated manner. Phoromatic has been a huge success, but today we are announcing that Phoromatic has reached a 1.0 status and additionally we are providing the Ubuntu Linux community with a new performance tracker in collaboration with Canonical.

Since Phoromatic went into public beta, we have continued to invest significant resources in enriching its capabilities, and of course the Phoronix Test Suite itself. These improvements range from Valentine's Day improvements to other features mentioned during our talk at this year's Southern California Linux Expo entitled The Five Stages of Benchmark Loss. As we alluded to last week, this month we have been working to push Phoromatic and Phoromatic Tracker to the next level and make it an even more innovative and rich platform for conducting automated tests in conjunction with the Phoronix Test Suite.

While we encourage you to experiment with Phoromatic to learn all of its abilities, some of the recent additions include the ability to generate composite graphs, the ability to narrow down the graphs that are shown, view real-time information about Phoromatic test systems, an RSS feed of new test result uploads, a feature-rich results table, an integrated system log viewer, and much more. The composite graphs show information like the geometric mean, harmonic mean, and aggregate sum for all test data on a given day. Rather than having to scroll through many (dozens in some instances like with our public trackers) you can simply look at a few graphs to look for any change in performance to determine whether to dig deeper and look at the individual test results for a given day / test run. With Phoromatic Tracker you can now also easily select what type of tests to show. If you just care about X.Org or the graphics performance, simply select that and you will only be exposed to that relevant data and nothing more. Below is an image of one of these result tables from the Phoromatic Kernel Tracker.

This table may overload you a bit with all of the information that is exposed as it is showing the Linux kernel test results on a daily basis going back 30 days for about 60 tests each day and with three systems. Of course, this is all configurable through the Phoromatic Tracker interface to view the data on select days or for specific systems. You can even view a table for all data, in which case it goes back to the start of December, if you so desire. This table is already quite rich as it shows of all of the data, but it also highlights the numbers it finds to be statistically important. With the kernel tests that are run everyday, when there is a change (whether it be positive or negative) it determines whether it is statistically significant in that it is greater than individual test's standard deviation on that given day for where tests are run multiple times (this is on top of the Phoronix Test Suite already doing its part to ensure statistical significance). If the change is found to be significant, the number is highlighted in red if it is a negative regression or blue if it is actually a performance boost. It really cannot get much easier for someone looking to analyze performance results!