Besides the tests suite, it is also possible to run performance comparisons between implementation variations of the same data structures.
What are we benchmarking?
To aid in our quest of benchmarking the ruby code, we use benchmark-ips to get data about the number of iteration per seconds for a given block of code.
Graph results
To help with the results visualization and spotting patterns on the data, the benchmark classes generate graphs results using Gruff.
BenchmarkHelper
All benchkmark comparisons subclass BenchmarkHelper to reuse some utility methods and string helpers. At the same time it brings a common convention about to proceed for the performance testing. You can find the existing benchmark implementations at https://github.com/renehernandez/data_structures_101/tree/master/perf.
Rake task for performance
Since the performance tests are not rspec-based, they cannot be run through the rspec cli. Instead, there is a set of rake tasks to run our performance tests. By loading perf.rake on the rake file we can run and generate the corresponding graphs for the analyses.