Benchmarking in C#

A bit of a change to my normal blog posts this time.... In the next few posts I will be talking about benchmark testing and in particular a NuGet package that allows you to run bench-marking tests in a .NET environment. 

So in this post I will demonstrate how you can use a NuGet package to measure the time it takes to open notepad on your local machine. 

This will be the starting point and I am aiming to build up some more complex examples as I learn about the NuGet package. 

So here goes.......

The NuGet package is called BenchMarkDotNet and is a powerful library for bench-marking various tasks. 

The GitHub page can be found here:

https://github.com/dotnet/BenchmarkDotNet

So to use this package, the first thing you need to do is create a new Console App (.NET Framework) project in Visual Studio 

You then need to add the NuGet package to the project (You should find the NuGet package if you search for 'BenchMarkDotNet'):

At the time of writing the latest version is v0.11.1

Once you have done this you need to create 2 classes. One will contain the code that runs the test while the other one will contain the the code that defines the benchmark test. So in my example I have the following:

• Program.cs - This will contain the code that runs the benchmark test.
• MyFirstBenchMark.cs - This class contains the code that defines the benchmark test.

Below are the contents of my classes:

Program.cs

Now this class is very simple and just contains a couple of lines to run the benchmark test. Note that the Console.ReadKey() method is there to make sure that the console window does not disappear when the test is completed. 


MyFirstBenchMark.cs

Now this class is a little more complex and I will delve into the detail in future blog posts, but a few things to note:

1) The SimpleJob attribute is used to parameterise your benchmark test
2) The GlobalSetUp attribute should contain code that is run before the benchmark test is run 
3) The GlobalCleanup attribute contains code that should be run after the benchmark test has been run
4) The Benchmark attribute contains a method that runs the benchmark test.

This project will:

• Open notepad (A set number of times - defined by the SimpleJob attribute)
• Cleanup the test by closing down all of the instances of notepad.

One thing you need to do is run the project in Release mode and you can do this by changing the Debug drop-down to Release

When you run the project you will be greeted with the following:

Now there is more than what I have shown above as the console will display details of all the tests that were run and you should see notepad being open and closed during the test run. Above, you will see a Mean, Error and Standard Deviation details about the tests that were run. These details are also exported in csv, md and html and can be found in the \bin\Release\BenchmarkDotNet.Artifacts\results directory. This is basically the same as above but in a more importable friendly format. 

So there you go, a quick example of how to run a benchmark test against opening notepad.

Next time I will explain how the SimpleJob attribute works and what the various parameters do.

Please feel free to download the project from my GitHub page:

https://github.com/daveyboywardlaw/BenchMarkingExploration