Ongoing
Reading some news on linux kernel 2.6 being slower than 2.4 and Linus's wish for daily performance testing. He sees it interesting if the benchmark could be rerun for older linx kernels, historical weekly if not daily builds.
One of the things done for Solaris 10 (and older versions) was exactly this. We do run benchmarks daily on the Solaris kernel, we've got runs going back a few years now, for the whole of Solaris 10 development cycle and before. We generate a couple of thousand runs of many benchmarks every month. (my group gets panic attacks if we think something possibly corrupts our database of runs).
Its does indeed help enourmously in tracking down regression. We've got good enough at this to find causes to most regressions to within a few days or so. We can then go talk to the very person/team whose the code may have caused the regression.
The way we do this, this whole running benchmarks non-stop, fully automated, etc, may be opening up to the public sometime, after OpenSolaris launches, probably, which we'll also be doing. Me,not being management, doesn't know the full details etc, but it looks to be happening.
Posted at 06:51PM Mar 31, 2005 by smg in Solaris | Comments[1]