As is well known, changes in Parrot during the last half-year have had
the effect of increasing the amount of memory required to build Parrot
in a reasonable amount of time. This is particularly evident on
machines that several years ago were perfectly adequate for building
Parrot but are now considered short on resources (such as my vintage
2004 iBook G4 with 256M physical memory). With patches prepared by
bacek, mikehh and others, I can get Parrot to build and run 'make test'
on my small resource machine, but it does take a long time.
What I would like to have is a benchmark test I could run which, on the
one hand, gives a small resource machine a good workout, but, on the
other hand, is small enough for me to run it consecutively enough times
to give me a statistically significant result in testing the various
garbage-collection-focused branches. For example, I know that
regardless of which machine I test on,
t/compilers/opsc/02-parse-all-ops.t takes longer than just about any
file in our test suite. If I were able to run it 30 times on master and
30 times in a GC-branch, I would have a good measure of the degree to
which a GC-branch improves over master (if indeed it does improve over
master ;-) ).
The problem is that 02-parse-all-ops.t takes so long to run on
small-resource machines that I can not, in practical terms, afford to
run it 30 times in a row. What I'd like is a test that takes say, about
4 seconds to run on a small resource box (and, of course, much faster on
most contemporary machines) so that I could run it 30 times in two
minutes on a given branch. That way, I could relatively quickly compare
various branches.
Does that make sense? Do we have such a test?
Thank you very much.
kid51
_______________________________________________
http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
