How are people benchmarking their hot thread(s) or how to use google benchmark in JUCE?

General JUCE discussion
1

Hi there,

Looking to see if others have gone down the rabbit hole of microbenchmarking in JUCE. Anyone have any luck getting Google Benchmark running ? Or are there other similar tools people are using ?

Just to clarify, looking for a microbenchmarking tool - am already happy with respect to macro benchmarking or profiling tools. Some thing I can wire up to my specific methods and their loops, or mock up similar to a unit test, that will then spit out some nice tables of mean times, variance etc. (apparently Google Benchmarking does this well).

With Google Benchmark, I’m a bit confused where to put the initialization code.

Thanks in advance for your help

2

I use it extensively for DSP.

In the projucer, create a “console application” project, and add the benchmark include/lib directory to the include/linker path and put “benchmark” in the “external libraries to link” field of the exporter. Then go into main.cpp and delete the main function, replacing it with BENCHMARK_MAIN();

Quick and dirty code:

#include "../JuceLibraryCode/JuceHeader.h"
#include "../whatever/you/want/to/bench.h"
#include <benchmark/benchmark.h> 


void MyBenchmark (benchmark::State& state) {
    for (auto _ : state) {
        auto result = something_to_benchmark(); 
        benchmark::DoNotOptimize(result); 
    }
}
BENCHMARK(MyBenchmark);
BENCHMARK_MAIN();

If you need more complicated setup for whatever you’re trying to benchmark you can use the benchmark::Fixture interface. Here’s an example, benchmarking a JUCE operation:

#include "../JuceLibraryCode/JuceHeader.h"
#include <benchmark/benchmark.h>
#include <string>
class Fixture : public benchmark::Fixture {
public:
    String message;
    void SetUp(const ::benchmark::State& state) {
        message = "setup";
    }

    void TearDown(const ::benchmark::State& state) {
        message = "teardown";
    }
};

BENCHMARK_F(Fixture, StringAppend)(benchmark::State& state) {
    for (auto _ : state) {
        message += "append";
    }
}

BENCHMARK_REGISTER_F(Fixture, StringAppend);
BENCHMARK_MAIN();
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3

Many thanks for the detailed example.

Haven’t completely got everything set up since wasting time on figuring out a nasty linker error, caused by me forgetting to set a linker flag. For anyone in the same boat, Projucer should be set as such:

32%20pm
Screen Shot 2019-07-12 at 3.12.32 pm.jpg2858Ă—1752 701 KB

4

fwiw on MacOS you can brew install google-benchmark and it will be placed in /usr/local/lib with headers in /usr/local/include, then you just make sure they’re in your linker/include paths in your environment and it “just works.”

It helps when you just want to run some micro benches from the command line.

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