🏋️ benchpress

benchpress is a lightweight command-line tool written in Go to help you coordinate benchmarks, run experiments, and collect output from various system tools, scripts, or probesall in a repeatable and structured way. Ideal for systems research, performance tuning, observability, or chaos testing workflows.

Features

• Run benchmarks in multiple phases: prerequisites, loads, and cases
• Define and reuse shell commands across benchmarking runs
• Run benchmarks multiple times (runs: N) to average out noise
• Collect structured output from diverse tools (e.g. funclatency, stress-ng, custom scripts)
• YAML-based config: easy to read, version, and share

How it works

• Prerequisites: Started before the main workload (e.g. tracing tools, background monitors)
• Loads: The synthetic or real workload to be measured
• Cases: Variations of system setup or instrumentation to benchmark (e.g. enabling probes)
• Runs: Each case/load pair is run multiple times for statistical significance

Example

runs: 5
prerequisites:
  - name: funclatency
    cmd: funclatency
    args:
      - /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6:read
loads:
  - name: stressor
    cmd: stress-ng
    args:
      - --hdd
      - 4
      - --hdd-bytes
      - 8G
      - --timeout 5m
      - --temp-path
      - /tmp/stress
cases:
  - name: baseline
  - name: with a uprobe
    cmd: ./uprobe
    env:
      - SOMECONFIG=value
    workdir: /home/ubuntu

Installation

go install github.com/therealbobo/benchpress@latest