Python Slots Performance
Overview of the Qt unit testing framework.
Qt Test is a framework for unit testing Qt based applications and libraries. Qt Test provides all the functionality commonly found in unit testing frameworks as well as extensions for testing graphical user interfaces.
Qt Test is designed to ease the writing of unit tests for Qt based applications and libraries:
- A performance analysis tool for software projects. It shows performance regresions and allows comparing different applications or implementations.
- From Python documentation: slots allows us to explicitly declare data members (like properties) and deny the creation of dict and weakref (unless explicitly declared in slots or available in a parent.) So, how does it relate to the issues I’ve mentioned? Let’s create a class ArticleWithSlots.
- Comparing speed for 1000 samples of 1000000 emits (Raw: expect approx 1460 sec more to complete) (Pyqt Slot: expect approx 1437 sec more to complete) Raw slot mean, stddev: 1.45 0.019 Pyqt slot mean, stddev: 1.446 0.015 Percent gain with pyqtSlot: 0% Raw times: 1.447, 1.478, 1.493, 1.482, 1.476, 1.45, 1.446, 1.433, 1.468, 1.451, 1.441, 1.458, 1.456, 1.467, 1.453, 1.444, 1.445, 1.446, 1.482, 1.446, 1.458.
In Python every class can have instance attributes. By default Python uses a dict to store an object’s instance attributes. This is really helpful as it allows setting arbitrary new attributes at runtime. However, for small classes with known attributes it might be a bottleneck. The dict wastes a lot of RAM. Python can’t just allocate a. If you want to learn more about speeding your Python code, I recommend you the book High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans, september 2014. Hope it was useful! 🙂 Don’t forget to share it with your friends!
Feature | Details |
Lightweight | Qt Test consists of about 6000 lines of code and 60 exported symbols. |
Self-contained | Qt Test requires only a few symbols from the Qt Core module for non-gui testing. |
Rapid testing | Qt Test needs no special test-runners; no special registration for tests. |
Data-driven testing | A test can be executed multiple times with different test data. |
Basic GUI testing | Qt Test offers functionality for mouse and keyboard simulation. |
Benchmarking | Qt Test supports benchmarking and provides several measurement back-ends. |
IDE friendly | Qt Test outputs messages that can be interpreted by Qt Creator, Visual Studio, and KDevelop. |
Thread-safety | The error reporting is thread safe and atomic. |
Type-safety | Extensive use of templates prevent errors introduced by implicit type casting. |
Easily extendable | Custom types can easily be added to the test data and test output. |
You can use a Qt Creator wizard to create a project that contains Qt tests and build and run them directly from Qt Creator. For more information, see Running Autotests.
Creating a Test¶
To create a test, subclass QObject
and add one or more private slots to it. Each private slot is a test function in your test. qExec()
can be used to execute all test functions in the test object.
In addition, you can define the following private slots that are not treated as test functions. When present, they will be executed by the testing framework and can be used to initialize and clean up either the entire test or the current test function.
initTestCase()
will be called before the first test function is executed.initTestCase_data()
will be called to create a global test data table.cleanupTestCase()
will be called after the last test function was executed.init()
will be called before each test function is executed.cleanup()
will be called after every test function.
Use initTestCase()
for preparing the test. Every test should leave the system in a usable state, so it can be run repeatedly. Cleanup operations should be handled in cleanupTestCase()
, so they get run even if the test fails.
Use init()
for preparing a test function. Every test function should leave the system in a usable state, so it can be run repeatedly. Cleanup operations should be handled in cleanup()
, so they get run even if the test function fails and exits early.
Alternatively, you can use RAII (resource acquisition is initialization), with cleanup operations called in destructors, to ensure they happen when the test function returns and the object moves out of scope.
If initTestCase()
fails, no test function will be executed. If init()
fails, the following test function will not be executed, the test will proceed to the next test function.
Example:
Finally, if the test class has a static public voidinitMain()
method, it is called by the QTEST_MAIN
macros before the QApplication
object is instantiated. This was added in 5.14.
For more examples, refer to the Qt Test Tutorial .
Syntax¶
The syntax to execute an autotest takes the following simple form:
Python Performance Time
Substitute testname
with the name of your executable. testfunctions
can contain names of test functions to be executed. If no testfunctions
are passed, all tests are run. If you append the name of an entry in testdata
, the test function will be run only with that test data.
For example:
Runs the test function called toUpper
with all available test data.
Runs the toUpper
test function with all available test data, and the toInt
test function with the test data called zero
(if the specified test data doesn’t exist, the associated test will fail).
Runs the testMyWidget
function test, outputs every signal emission and waits 500 milliseconds after each simulated mouse/keyboard event.
Logging Options¶
The following command line options determine how test results are reported:
-o
filename,format Writes output to the specified file, in the specified format (one oftxt
,xml
,lightxml
,junitxml
ortap
). The special filename-
may be used to log to standard output.-o
filename Writes output to the specified file.-txt
Outputs results in plain text.-xml
Outputs results as an XML document.-lightxml
Outputs results as a stream of XML tags.-junitxml
Outputs results as an JUnit XML document.-csv
Outputs results as comma-separated values (CSV). This mode is only suitable for benchmarks, since it suppresses normal pass/fail messages.-teamcity
Outputs results in TeamCity format.-tap
Outputs results in Test Anything Protocol (TAP) format.
The first version of the -o
option may be repeated in order to log test results in multiple formats, but no more than one instance of this option can log test results to standard output.
If the first version of the -o
option is used, neither the second version of the -o
option nor the -txt
, -xml
, -lightxml
, -teamcity
, -junitxml
or -tap
options should be used.
If neither version of the -o
option is used, test results will be logged to standard output. If no format option is used, test results will be logged in plain text.
Test Log Detail Options¶
The following command line options control how much detail is reported in test logs:
-silent
Silent output; only shows fatal errors, test failures and minimal status messages.-v1
Verbose output; shows when each test function is entered. (This option only affects plain text output.)-v2
Extended verbose output; shows eachQCOMPARE()
andQVERIFY()
. (This option affects all output formats and implies-v1
for plain text output.)-vs
Shows all signals that get emitted and the slot invocations resulting from those signals. (This option affects all output formats.)
Testing Options¶
The following command-line options influence how tests are run:
-functions
Outputs all test functions available in the test, then quits.-datatags
Outputs all data tags available in the test. A global data tag is preceded by ‘ __global__ ‘.-eventdelay
ms If no delay is specified for keyboard or mouse simulation (QTest::keyClick(), QTest::mouseClick() etc.), the value from this parameter (in milliseconds) is substituted.-keydelay
ms Like -eventdelay, but only influences keyboard simulation and not mouse simulation.-mousedelay
ms Like -eventdelay, but only influences mouse simulation and not keyboard simulation.-maxwarnings
number Sets the maximum number of warnings to output. 0 for unlimited, defaults to 2000.-nocrashhandler
Disables the crash handler on Unix platforms. On Windows, it re-enables the Windows Error Reporting dialog, which is turned off by default. This is useful for debugging crashes.-platform
name This command line argument applies to all Qt applications, but might be especially useful in the context of auto-testing. By using the “offscreen” platform plugin (-platform offscreen) it’s possible to have tests that use QWidget orQWindow
run without showing anything on the screen. Currently the offscreen platform plugin is only fully supported on X11.
Benchmarking Options¶
The following command line options control benchmark testing:
-callgrind
Uses Callgrind to time benchmarks (Linux only).-tickcounter
Uses CPU tick counters to time benchmarks.-eventcounter
Counts events received during benchmarks.-minimumvalue
n Sets the minimum acceptable measurement value.-minimumtotal
n Sets the minimum acceptable total for repeated executions of a test function.-iterations
n Sets the number of accumulation iterations.-median
n Sets the number of median iterations.-vb
Outputs verbose benchmarking information.
Miscellaneous Options¶
-help
Outputs the possible command line arguments and gives some useful help.
Qt Test Environment Variables¶
You can set certain environment variables in order to affect the execution of an autotest:
QTEST_DISABLE_CORE_DUMP
Setting this variable to a non-zero value will disable the generation of a core dump file.QTEST_DISABLE_STACK_DUMP
Setting this variable to a non-zero value will prevent Qt Test from printing a stacktrace in case an autotest times out or crashes.
Creating a Benchmark¶
To create a benchmark, follow the instructions for creating a test and then add a QBENCHMARK
macro or setBenchmarkResult()
to the test function that you want to benchmark. In the following code snippet, the macro is used:
A test function that measures performance should contain either a single QBENCHMARK
macro or a single call to setBenchmarkResult()
. Multiple occurrences make no sense, because only one performance result can be reported per test function, or per data tag in a data-driven setup.
Avoid changing the test code that forms (or influences) the body of a QBENCHMARK
macro, or the test code that computes the value passed to setBenchmarkResult()
. Differences in successive performance results should ideally be caused only by changes to the product you are testing. Changes to the test code can potentially result in misleading report of a change in performance. If you do need to change the test code, make that clear in the commit message.
In a performance test function, the QBENCHMARK
or setBenchmarkResult()
should be followed by a verification step using QCOMPARE()
, QVERIFY()
, and so on. You can then flag a performance result as invalid if another code path than the intended one was measured. A performance analysis tool can use this information to filter out invalid results. For example, an unexpected error condition will typically cause the program to bail out prematurely from the normal program execution, and thus falsely show a dramatic performance increase.
Selecting the Measurement Back-end¶
The code inside the QBENCHMARK macro will be measured, and possibly also repeated several times in order to get an accurate measurement. This depends on the selected measurement back-end. Several back-ends are available. They can be selected on the command line:
Name | Command-line Argument | Availability |
Walltime | (default) | All platforms |
CPU tick counter | -tickcounter | Windows, macOS, Linux, many UNIX-like systems. |
Event Counter | -eventcounter | All platforms |
Valgrind Callgrind | -callgrind | Linux (if installed) |
Linux Perf | -perf | Linux |
In short, walltime is always available but requires many repetitions to get a useful result. Tick counters are usually available and can provide results with fewer repetitions, but can be susceptible to CPU frequency scaling issues. Valgrind provides exact results, but does not take I/O waits into account, and is only available on a limited number of platforms. Event counting is available on all platforms and it provides the number of events that were received by the event loop before they are sent to their corresponding targets (this might include non-Qt events).
The Linux Performance Monitoring solution is available only on Linux and provides many different counters, which can be selected by passing an additional option -perfcountercountername
, such as -perfcountercache-misses
, -perfcounterbranch-misses
, or -perfcounterl1d-load-misses
. The default counter is cpu-cycles
. The full list of counters can be obtained by running any benchmark executable with the option -perfcounterlist
.
Monty Python Slots
Using the performance counter may require enabling access to non-privileged applications.
Devices that do not support high-resolution timers default to one-millisecond granularity.
See Writing a Benchmark in the Qt Test Tutorial for more benchmarking examples.
Using Global Test Data¶
You can define initTestCase_data()
to set up a global test data table. Each test is run once for each row in the global test data table. When the test function itself is data-driven , it is run for each local data row, for each global data row. So, if there are g
rows in the global data table and d
rows in the test’s own data-table, the number of runs of this test is g
times d
.
Global data is fetched from the table using the QFETCH_GLOBAL()
macro.
The following are typical use cases for global test data:
Selecting among the available database backends in QSql tests to run every test against every database.
Doing all networking tests with and without SSL (HTTP versus HTTPS) and proxying.
Testing a timer with a high precision clock and with a coarse one.
Selecting whether a parser shall read from a
QByteArray
or from aQIODevice
.
Monty Python Slot Machine App
For example, to test each number provided by roundTripInt_data()
with each locale provided by initTestCase_data()
:
Slot Machine In Python
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