A BoF on this topic has been held every dev meeting for the past couple of years. We’ve found these BoFs very useful in identifying the main pain points in using LLVM’s performance tracking infrastructure. Only a limited amount of effort is put into improving the infrastructure and the discussions held at previous BoFs have been very valuable in generating the best-bang-for-buck ideas. Every year, LLVM’s performance tracking infrastructure has improved substantially. Without having the previous BoFs, the improvements would have been less substantial.
Last year, the BoF mainly focussed on what was still needed infrastructure-wise to efficiently make good use of the performance data collected by performance tracking bots. A number of significant improvements have been made based on last years’ BoF discussions - but we’re not there yet: currently, it seems like the community is mostly ignoring llvm.org/perf numbers as it’s still too much effort to figure out what’s causing observed performance improvements or regressions. It seems like we’re close to having a good-enough infrastructure for many developers to start caring and actively using the performance-tracking infrastructure. Let’s discuss what improvements we really still need before we can efficiently make use of llvm.org/perf specifically and LNT-based performance tracking in general.
