Metric names expectation files

Fuchsia's infrastructure for reporting performance test results has a set of checked-in expectations for the names of the metrics that each performance test may produce. This is also referred to as the metric names allowlist. This was added in https://fxbug.dev/42056406.

If the set of metrics produced by a performance test does not match those listed in the test's expectations file, the test will fail when run. This means that if a test is changed such that the set of metrics it produces also changes, its expectation file must be updated to match.

For the tests in fuchsia.git, the expectation files are located in src/tests/end_to_end/perf/expected_metric_names/.

The expectation files are required for all new performance tests, which includes all Python-based performance tests.

Intended benefits

  • The expectation files are intended to help keep metric naming consistent. They should make it easier to review the naming of metrics, and provide a way to enforce the reviews through OWNERS checks.

  • The expectation files should make it easier for test authors to see what other metric names are used, for comparison, because the list will be checked in to the codebase.

  • The expectation files should make it easier to see how the list of produced metrics has changed for a given CL. They allow developers to be sure that a CL has not accidentally removed or renamed metrics.

  • The expectation files provide a check on the number of metrics that are added. This is useful because there are costs to adding large numbers of metrics.

  • The expectation files should make it easier to ensure that the set of metrics produced by a test is deterministic. Metrics may be produced dynamically, and there is a range of ways of producing them. That means that without the expectation check, it is possible for a test's set of metrics to be non-deterministic. That is undesirable, because it leads to random gaps in the data produced by CI builds.

How to update expectation files

One way to update the expectation file for a test is to run the test locally with the environment variable FUCHSIA_EXPECTED_METRIC_NAMES_DEST_DIR set, using an invocation like this:

FUCHSIA_EXPECTED_METRIC_NAMES_DEST_DIR=$(pwd)/src/tests/end_to_end/perf/expected_metric_names/ \
    fx test --e2e -o host_x64/fidlc_microbenchmarks_test

When this environment variable is set, the test will write an updated expectation file into the directory specified by the environment variable. Note that this will not preserve optional metric names in the expectation file.

When this environment variable is not set, the test will report an error if the metrics produced by the test don't match those listed in the expectation file, and it will print the differences. You can update the expectation file manually based on the diffs in the error message if necessary.

How to add an expectation file

If you are adding a new performance test, you can add an expectation file for it with the following steps.

For tests using the fuchsia_component_perf_test GN template, the steps involve manually creating a placeholder expectation file:

  1. Create an empty placeholder version of the expectation file in src/tests/end_to_end/perf/expected_metric_names/.

  2. Add the expected_metric_names_filepath argument in the GN declaration of the test (the fuchsia_component_perf_test GN template invocation).

  3. Run the test locally with FUCHSIA_EXPECTED_METRIC_NAMES_DEST_DIR set, as described above, to generate the file contents.

For tests using the python_perf_test GN template, the expectation file name is specified both in GN and in the test code, so it is possible to avoid the inconvenience of manually creating a placeholder file by following these steps:

  1. Pass the name in the expected_metric_names_filename argument to publish_fuchsiaperf() in the Python test code.

  2. Set expected_metric_names_filepaths = [] in the GN declaration of the test (the python_perf_test GN template invocation).

  3. Run the test locally with FUCHSIA_EXPECTED_METRIC_NAMES_DEST_DIR set, as described above, to generate the file.

  4. Set expected_metric_names_filepaths to the actual list of expectation files in the GN declaration of the test.

  5. Add the expectation file to your Git checkout with git add src/tests/end_to_end/perf/expected_metric_names/.

These steps for python_perf_test also work if the test has multiple expectation files.

It is possible to add the file to the BUILD.gn file first, but the GN build will fail if the file does not exist.

Optional metrics

The expectation files may contain entries with the suffix [optional]. These metrics are allowed to be absent in the test's output. This allows metrics to be architecture-specific or machine-specific. These metrics should be commented to say why they are optional. (Comment lines start with "#".)

This also allows for metrics to be non-determistic in whether they are produced or not. However, having a non-deterministic metric will usually be considered a bug that should be fixed.

Skipping summarization of metrics

By default, when using the Python perf_publish library, the fuchsiaperf files that get published are the summarized versions.

This summarization does two things that are worth calling out:

  • We treat the first value in each fuchsiaperf entry as a warm-up run and drop it.
  • There may be multiple entries for the same test case (for multiple process runs), in which case we merge them.

Doing this as a postprocessing step has these benefits:

  • It avoids the need to implement this processing either upstream (in the C++ perftest library or in similar libraries for other languages) or in downstream consumers.
  • The summary fuchsiaperf file is much smaller than the "raw data" fuchsiaperf files and hence more manageable.
  • The "raw data" fuchsiaperf files can still be made available for anyone who wishes to analyze the raw data.

In some cases though, this might be undesirable: to keep the initial iterations' times instead of dropping them or to allow standard deviations to be reported to Chromeperf and have them displayed in the graphs.

Therefore, summarization can be turned off by adding [no-summarize-metrics] at the top of a metric names expectations file.