Introducing Benchy

Benchy is an open source .net tool for benchmarking the execution speed of sections of code after each build. Benchmarks are graphed so that changes to performance characteristics in builds can be easily visualised.

I created Benchy because I wanted to do some performance tuning, but I was reluctant to start without having a reliable way to measure the results of my changes over time. I also wanted to be able to see when changes were introduced that had negative impacts on performance. Benchy is my first complete and released open source project. Starting things is hard, finishing things is even harder.

It was fun to be able to start a fresh green fields project that has potential to be useful. As Benchy is a simple system and a new project, I found it was pretty straightforward to write tests first and do Test Driven Development. (TDD with .net, it exists!) I often feel uneasy making things more complex than they need to be, so I was glad that I used Moq for the tests. I really liked not having to add a whole bunch of extra cruft to mock out dependencies during testing.

I shamelessly stole most of the framework concepts from nUnit.

I used flot for graphing the benchmark results.

Read all about it on its dedicated page at http://www.keza.net/benchy/

Or have a look at the source at https://github.com/kezakez/Benchy

Thanks to the company I work at for supporting my ideas and open source.