Show HN: Hyperfine – a command-line benchmarking tool

Nifty! Step up over just using time. Unfortunately, timing things in general isn&#x27;t going to be a very effective benchmark.<p>Without understanding what a program is doing, you don&#x27;t understand what is impacting your results, and have no real knowledge on how things are going to differ when you go to use them in the &quot;real world&quot;. Is one process faster when single threaded vs. a low core count, but another is massively parallel, and loses out until scaled higher? Are your commands testing the thing you think they&#x27;re testing? What is your limiting factor? If you don&#x27;t know why the results are what they are, instead of higher, you don&#x27;t have a good benchmark.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brendangregg.com&#x2F;activebenchmarking.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brendangregg.com&#x2F;activebenchmarking.html</a> &#x2F; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brendangregg.com&#x2F;ActiveBenchmarking&#x2F;bonnie++.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brendangregg.com&#x2F;ActiveBenchmarking&#x2F;bonnie++.html</a>

Nice, that looks very handy especially the analysis of multiple runs.<p>Just today I was playing with &#x2F;proc&#x2F;sys&#x2F;vm&#x2F;drop_caches, I&#x27;d never used it before, it makes a massive difference reading from a spinning disk!<p>For example to read tens of thousands of files (using 8 processes), it would take me<p><pre><code> real 5m33.048s </code></pre> Then if I ran the command again, without flushing the cache, it&#x27;d take:<p><pre><code> real 0m6.502s</code></pre>

When given multiple commands, can it interleave executions instead of benchmarking them one after the other?<p>This would be useful when comparing two similar commands, as interleaving them makes it less likely that e.g. a load spike will unfavorably affect only one of them, or due to e.g. thermal throttling negatively affecting the last command.

Tangentially related, look into rt-tests (from linux-rt) for scheduler latency tests.<p>See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Realtime_kernel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Realtime_kernel</a><p>The effect of the linux-rt patchset is dramatic.

This looks excellent. Does it have a non-TTY&#x2F;no—color mode that I could use in a CI environment?

What is a use case for command line benchmarking?

Looks cool!<p>Could it use dtrace to measure other metrics besides time?