What Shall We Benchmark Next? Let Us Know!

With Phoromatic we make it easy to build a test farm for benchmarking and automated regression management and to prove it we began monitoring the Linux kernel performance on a daily basis where we track the performance of the latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis using multiple systems. This has been going on for months and then yesterday we announced that Phoromatic reached a 1.0 status and that we have launched Phoromatic Ubuntu Tracker, a way to monitor the performance of Ubuntu Linux as a whole on a daily basis by benchmarking the most recent development packages. A day has passed so now we are already thinking of what next to add to our test farm for continuous performance tracking.

Back in December we did launch a Fedora performance tracker, but that didn't go too far as tracking Rawhide wasn't the best since some package updates would leave the system in a broken state and would require manual intervention to resolve -- we like everything to be automated. One of the internal ideas have been to add another tracker that's tracking Ubuntu's performance, but with the xorg-edgers PPA to track specifically the latest Linux graphics performance. We'd love to have an upstream Mesa tracker following Git on a per-commit basis, but with there being the need at times to update the DRM / libdrm too, that makes matters a bit more complicated for automating in a reliable way, where as using the xorg-edgers PPA would be a bit more sane and easily reproducible by others. Right now the Ubuntu and Linux kernel trackers are doing everything on a daily basis, but Phoromatic is capable of monitoring the performance of a software component even more closely than that down to a per-commit basis or when triggered by other external factors, which would be great for tracking Mesa or other parts of the graphics stack. We've also thought about tracking the performance of LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine), but haven't made any decisions yet and we are looking for comments from the community (and ideally any upstream projects) as to what you would like to see tracked for performance regressions/changes.

There's the two systems for the kernel tracker (an ASRock NetTop ION 330 and a CompuLab Fit-PC2 NetTop) and then the new Ubuntu tracker systems (two MSI WindBox NetTops and an Apple Mac Mini) running within the Phoronix office. As you can see though, we have room for more systems (and plenty of hardware) as well as space on the network, so bring on the ideas for new Phoromatic Tracker setups. Granted, our only limiting factor for helping out more open-source projects with this is on the electrical side, but you can help us with that by subscribing to Phoronix Premium, using our shopping links when making online purchases (at like Amazon and NewEgg), making a tip/donation, and continuing to visit our sites and engage with our community via the forums whereby you are supporting the advertisements.

Share with us your ideas for what you would like to see tracked next. About the only requirements is the updating of the software must be able to be handled reliably in an automated way, there must be active interest within the community (we don't want a tracker that few people will benefit from), ideally interest from the upstream project itself, and it must be updated at least daily. Companies wishing to employ our automated regression tracking and remote test management system internally can contact PTS Commercial or try out the free public version of Phoromatic at Phoromatic.com.