perfket

Perfket is a hypothetical open-source framework designed for cross-platform performance benchmarking and profiling of software systems. It provides a standardized language for defining benchmark scenarios and a set of pluggable backends to collect metrics such as CPU throughput, memory latency, I/O bandwidth, and network latency across different hardware and operating systems.

Origin and scope: Conceived by a consortium of developers in 2022; it aims to improve reproducibility of benchmarks by using a common data model and versioned scenarios. It targets Linux, Windows, and macOS, and can run on bare metal or virtualized environments. The project is released under an open-source license.

Architecture and features: Core components include a scenario compiler, a metrics collector, and a results registry. A declarative scenario language allows users to describe workloads, resource limits, and measurement intervals. Backends exist for local execution, cloud environments, and container platforms. Results are exported in JSON and CSV; dashboards can be generated to compare runs.

Reception and usage: Widely adopted in academic research and industry for performance evaluation, regression testing, and capacity planning. Critics note a learning curve and the need for careful hardware calibration to ensure comparability.

See also: Benchmarking; Performance engineering; Open-source benchmarking frameworks.