I want to get going on some performance tuning, but believe it is best
guided and controlled by well-organized benchmarks. To that end, I
propose adding a place for benchmarks to the River structure.
We will need several categories of benchmark code:
1. System level benchmarks. These benchmarks measure some public
features, such as the outrigger JavaSpace implementation. For these, I
think a similar structure to QA may be best. However, I need to
understand how the QA harness links together clients and servers, and
whether it has any special performance implications. We may need, for
example, to add network delays to properly score implementations that
involve different amounts of communication.
2. Internal benchmarks. These are more like unit tests, and need to
mirror the main src package structure so that they can access non-public
code.
3. Experimental code. In some situations it is useful to do run-offs
between two or more implementations of the same class. We cannot have
two classes with the same fully qualified name at the same time, so this
type of test will need special copies of the classes with modified class
names or package names. In addition to actually doing the tests and
picking the implementation to go in the trunk, it is useful to keep
discarded candidates around. One of them may turn out to be a better
basis in a future performance campaign.
Thoughts? Alternatives? Comments?
Patricia
