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Hyperfine: A command-line benchmarking tool

(github.com)
238 points hundredwatt | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 21:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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forrestthewoods ◴[19 Nov 24 06:37 UTC] No.42180588[source]▶
Hyperfine is hyper frustrating because it only works with really really fine microsecond level benchmarks. Once you get into the millisecond range it’s worthless.
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sharkdp ◴[19 Nov 24 10:54 UTC] No.42182084[source]▶
That doesn't make a lot of sense. It's more like the opposite of what you are saying. The precision of hyperfine is typically in the single-digit millisecond range. Maybe just below 1 ms if you take special care to run the benchmark on a quiet system. Everything below that (microsecond or nanosecond range) is something that you need to address with other forms of benchmarking.

But for everything in the right range (milliseconds, seconds, minutes or above), hyperfine is well suited.

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forrestthewoods ◴[19 Nov 24 16:03 UTC] No.42184949[source]▶
No it’s not.

Back in the day my goal for Advent of Code was to run all solutions in under 1 second total. Hyperfine would take like 30 minutes to benchmark a 1 second runtime.

It was hyper frustrating. I could not find a good way to get Hyperfine to do what I wanted.

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1. sharkdp ◴[19 Nov 24 16:18 UTC] No.42185113[source]▶
If that's the case, I would consider it a bug. Please feel free to report it. In general, hyperfine should not take longer than ~3 seconds, unless the command itself takes > 300 ms second to run. In the latter case, we do a minimum of 10 runs by default. So if your program takes 3 min for a single iteration, it would take 30 min by default — yes. But this can be controlled using the `-m`/`--min-runs` option. You can also specify the exact amount of runs using `-r`/`--runs`, if you prefer that.

> I could not find a good way to get Hyperfine to do what I wanted

This is all documented here: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine/tree/master?tab=readme-... under "Basic benchmarks". The options to control the amount of runs are also listed in `hyperfine --help` and in the man page. Please let us know if you think we can improve the documentation / discovery of those options.