Document Plugin Performance

Plugins should perform well, that is, they should not impact the system performance in a negative way. If we ask the Plugin author to document the performance of Plugins we will get more HighQualityPlugins over time.

I propose to add a new field to the Plugin page for Plugin authors to fill out. Example:

The Plugin author measures the performance of the system with Plugin related and unrelated topics. Of corse, this depends on the server environment, nevertheless it gives a good estimate of the performance. Documenting the performance is an incentive to write speedy Plugins, for example by loading modules only when required (as documented in TWikiPlugins)

The question is where the Plugin performance data should be documented:

1. In Plugin Info table:
   • Performance data gets shipped with the Plugin
   • Author sees the field while writing the Plugins topic
2. In PackageForm of Plugin topic in Plugins web:
   • Performance data is only listed on TWiki.org because the form is only present in Plugin topic of the Plugins web
   • Author discovers late that there are performance tests to be run

It looks like it is better to put the field into the Plugin Info table, e.g. to update the NewPluginTemplate.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Dec 2003

I think this is a great idea, as long as we give people a tool with which to benchmark their system and produce a relative score for their plugin.

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Dec 2003

A standard benchmarking tool would also make it easier for peer review. "On my site with speedy cgi and apache2 this plugin's perfomance was...".

-- MattWilkie - 24 Dec 2003

I just created the Plugins.PluginBenchmarks topic. Plugin authors are encourraged to measure and document the relative performance of their Plugin. See CalendarPlugin for an example.

-- PeterThoeny - 03 Jan 2004

There will of course be some other dependencies, for example which version of TWiki is being run, and which skin is being used. For example the skin I am using causes pages to take twice as long to load as the default skin, so benchmarking on my system will underestimate the plugin overhead when using the standard skin by the same factor.

-- MartinWatt - 05 Jan 2004

There is no excuse anymore not to measure the performance of a Plugin: PluginBenchmarkAddOn helps you gather the data.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Nov 2004