Measure performance changes with benchcmp

📅 Tue, Jan 26, 2016 ⏱️ 2-minute read

go test -bench=.

Go has a great option to write your benchmarks and run it together with go test with option -bench. To create a benchmark function you must do the following:

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package anonymizer

import "testing"

func BenchmarkAnonymizerShortString(b *testing.B) {
	for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
		Anonymizer("This is a secret message with my private email john@gmail.com")
	}
}

func BenchmarkAnonymizerLongString(b *testing.B) {
	for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
		Anonymizer("This is a secret message with my private emails: john@gmail.com, john@gmail.com, john@gmail.com, john@gmail.com, john@gmail.com, john@gmail.com, john@gmail.com.")
	}
}

Anonymizer() function searchs for emails in the string and replaces it to “****”.

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go test -bench=. > old.txt && cat old.txt

PASS
BenchmarkAnonymizerShortString	   30000	     49060 ns/op
BenchmarkAnonymizerLongString 	   20000	     67854 ns/op
ok  	anonymizer	4.042s

Improve Anonymizer()

Let me show you this Anonymizer():

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package anonymizer

import (
	"regexp"
	"strings"
)

// Anonymizer func
func Anonymizer(s string) string {
	re, err := regexp.Compile("[A-Za-z0-9](([_\\.\\-]?[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*)@([A-Za-z0-9]+)(([\\.\\-]?[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*)\\.([A-Za-z]{2,})")
	if err != nil {
		return s
	}

	matches := re.FindAllString(s, -1)
	for _, matchStr := range matches {
		matchStr = strings.Trim(matchStr, " ")
		if matchStr != "" {
			s = strings.Replace(s, matchStr, "****", -1)
		}
	}

	return s
}

Then I decided that this RegExp is a bit complicated and replaced it to the one sufficient for all practical purposes:

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re, err := regexp.Compile("(\\w[-._\\w]*\\w@\\w[-._\\w]*\\w\\.\\w{2,3})")

And run go test again:

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go test -bench=. > new.txt

Measure our improvement

So now we have 2 versions of our code and benchmark results for both, lets use benchcmp tool to measure a growth of performance:

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go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/benchcmp

benchcmp old.txt new.txt
benchmark                          old ns/op     new ns/op     delta
BenchmarkAnonymizerShortString     50225         40648         -19.07%
BenchmarkAnonymizerLongString      69017         54494         -21.04%

Negative values are good, it means that 1 operation calculates faster after our changes. Of cause this benchmark is artificial and values can be different even on the same environment, so don’t forget it and repeat your experiments.