BenchErl is a publicly available scalability benchmark suite for applications written in Erlang. In contrast to other benchmark suites, which are usually designed to report a particular performance point, our benchmark suite aims to assess scalability, i.e., a set of performance points that show how an application’s performance changes when additional resources (e.g. CPU cores, schedulers, etc.) are added.
MOTIVATION
The concurrency model of Erlang is one of its most advertised features. However, understanding the behaviour of a highly concurrent Erlang application and most importantly detecting the bottlenecks that hinder the exploitation of a large number of CPU cores has not been an easy task. A tool that would help towards this direction has been missing for Erlang.
The features included in BenchErl allow the execution of applications in various execution environments, the visualization of the results, and the extraction of useful conclusions. Hence, it is a tool that might help the Erlang community make a first step to better understand the parameters that affect the parallel execution of Erlang applications.
KEY FEATURES
Unique: BenchErl is the only benchmark suite that targets the scalability of Erlang applications.
Configurable: BenchErl allows the configuration of a large number of parameters that might affect the execution of a benchmark. The execution of the benchmark with all possible combinations of these parameters is handled by BenchErl.
Automated: BenchErl handles the collection, the execution and the visual presentation of the benchmark execution results.
Extendable: It is straightforward to add new benchmarks and applications to BenchErl.