On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 8:12 AM, Michał J Gajda <mjgajda@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Friends,

I have a few weeks free just now, and a keen interest in GHC performance, so please count me in as a person interested in developing the solution :-).

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell@gmail.com> wrote:

There are a few "projects" in this area I think we should undertake:

## Set up a performance dashboard

Example: http://goperfd.appspot.com/ (try clicking the "Perf" and "Graphs" buttons.)

I think the way to go here is:

* Figure out how to build GHC and run the nofib suite in a repeatable (i.e. scripted) manner.

Wouldn't it be faster to take GHC builds from the current builder?
I understand that running GHC build for each commit may take some time...
Where would be put the infrastructure?

I could help to set it up, but I do not possess enough CPU power to hold it for a long time.

Don't worry too much about how you build GHC. Any way that works is fine. The important part is that it's simple and works. If it can be written as a simple shell script + some tools to post-process the output, it would be easy to run on Jenkins.

Also, don't worry about finding a machine that can run the benchmarks concurrently. If you get a dashboard and continuous build that works on your development machine, we can find a real server for it (e.g. I have an unused http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40)

So here's what I'd suggest:

1. Write a script that builds and runs the benchmarks on your local machine.

2. Write something that massages the output into a format that can be pushed to whatever database the perf dashboard would user.

3. Get a dashboard up and running.

4. Tell us about the results. We'll find machines to run it on.

Feel free to ask questions if you get stuck anywhere.

-- Johan