[Sugar-devel] Sugar Performance testing

[Gonzalo Odiard]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Sebastian Silva
<sebastian at fuentelibre.org>wrote:

>  Hi dear Sugar developers.
> We have participated in the deployment in Peru of Sugar 0.94 (classic) for
> XO1 and XO1.5. It will be ongoing in 2014 and hopefully we will tighten the
> feedback circle and work closer with upstream (master).
> Now we as a team are working in Colombia with XO1.75 and again, the issue
> of performance creeps in, and they are interested in downgrading to Sugar
> 0.94 (classic).
> "that way madness lies", if we stay without updating, we break cohesion.
> It would be best if we could all just work on the same basis.
>
> For us to base our work on 0.101+ (new) Sugar, we have to make sure we
> have solved the performance issues plaguing (new) Sugar and/or OLPC/OS 13.x.
>

+1 in all the rationale.


>
> For this I need your advice.
>
> *How do I setup an identical environment for (classic) 0.94 Sugar and
> (new) 0.101+ Sugar? Can I use sugar-build for this, or something else...?*
>
>
I am not sure if you need a _identical_ environment to compare 0.94 and
0.101.
In the end, the user will be affected by the addition of all the changes
(system, sugar, activities)
When I tried to detect performance problems in activities, the worst
regressions
were by modifications in the activities itself, because of adding a
functionality or similar.
We already know there are issues with the port to gtk3 too.

Then, IMHO, the first rough test would be identify what are the points with
performance
regressions. Test activity startup of all the activities you use,
comparing the version available for sugar 0.94, and the last version
available.
Test sugar, and see what is slower, the journal? any control panel section?
Anything in particular? Something is getting slower after a time of use?
Use the xos to test, your development environment can be faster and is more
difficult
see any difference.



>
>
> *How do I profile the session (CPU usage, memory consumption, timing)? *
>

Activity startup time is in the shell.log if sugar have debug enabled.

You can use [1] to see memory usage.

We used cProfile [2] to get more precise numbers, but that required usually
program a little test case with the code we wanted to profile.

There are a old page about profiling in wiki laptop too [3]

Right now, I am trying to use systemtap to profile/detect memory leaks,
but I need solve some problems. Will report when have something usable.



>
>
> * Do we have some automated GUI testing? Can I make some? *These
> questions should help bring me to a point where I can measure and try
> changes specific to Sugar.
>
> I appreciate any advice you can give me on this topic.
>
> Next I'd like to try to determine if it's related to the base distribution.
>

What distribution are you using with 0.94 and 0.101?


>
> Regards,
> Sebastian
>
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> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
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>
>


-- 
Gonzalo Odiard

SugarLabs - Learning Software for children

[1] https://raw.github.com/pixelb/ps_mem/master/ps_mem.py
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Optimize_TreeViews#How_To_Test
[3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Performance_tuning
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