protobuf/benchmarks/README.md

Protocol Buffers Benchmarks

This directory contains benchmarking schemas and data sets that you can use to test a variety of performance scenarios against your protobuf language runtime.

Prerequisite

First, you need to follow the instruction in the root directory's README to build your language's protobuf, then:

CPP

You need to install cmake before building the benchmark.

We are using google/benchmark as the benchmark tool for testing cpp. This will be automaticly made during build the cpp benchmark.

JAVA

We're using maven to build the java benchmarks, which is the same as to build the Java protobuf. There're no other tools need to install. We're using google/caliper as benchmark tool, which can be automaticly included by maven.

Big data

There's some optional big testing data which is not included in the directory initially, you need to run the following command to download the testing data:

$ ./download_data.sh 

After doing this the big data file will automaticly generated in the benchmark directory.

Run instructions

To run all the benchmark dataset:

For java:

$ make java

For cpp:

$ make cpp

To run a specific dataset:

For java:

$ make java-benchmark
$ ./java-benchmark $(specific generated dataset file name) [-- $(caliper option)]

For cpp:

$ make cpp-benchmark
$ ./cpp-benchmark $(specific generated dataset file name)

Benchmark datasets

Each data set is in the format of benchmarks.proto:

1. name is the benchmark dataset's name.
2. message_name is the benchmark's message type full name (including package and message name)
3. payload is the list of raw data.

The schema for the datasets is described in benchmarks.proto.

Benchmark likely want to run several benchmarks against each data set (parse, serialize, possibly JSON, possibly using different APIs, etc).

We would like to add more data sets. In general we will favor data sets that make the overall suite diverse without being too large or having too many similar tests. Ideally everyone can run through the entire suite without the test run getting too long.