Run benchmarks triggered by CI comment

[adriangb]

Inspired by @alamb in #15561 (comment) I'd like to propose a comment that triggers benchmarks to get run in CI and the results reported back via a comment.

[brambhattabhishek]

/assign

[alamb]

We had an earlier version of this feature contributed by @gruuya

The biggest challenge is finding suitable machines to run the benchmarks on -- github runners (what run normal CI scripts) are shared VMs with wildly varying performance and so the numbers are even more variable

What I suggest we focus on is a set of scripts that people can run and report results to PRs (thus punting the question of what machines actually run the results).

the bench.sh file in the datafusion repo already handles running benchmarks pretty well

What is not yet automated is

1. comparing results between a branch and main (aka comparing the performance of the branch)
2. Triggering this comparison

For 1, my script here compares a branch and main: https://github.com/alamb/datafusion-benchmarking/blob/main/gh_compare_branch.sh but it is not general purpose and makes a bunch of assumptions about the machine on

For 2, I have now some sort of shell script work queue that is probably not worth replicatng

So what I would suggest is:

1. create a script, datafusion/benchmarks/compare_pr.sh, similar to https://github.com/alamb/datafusion-benchmarking/blob/main/gh_compare_branch.sh that runs the benchmarks and reports results to github

Then we can figure out how we want to be triggering it

[adriangb]

Hmm makes sense.

I wonder also if we could get a cloud provider to donate enough credits to wire up a bare metal server? Like if we got $300k in credits we could practically not worry about it. I'll ask our GCP rep.

[adriangb]

We now have this. The current iteration is at https://github.com/adriangb/datafusion-benchmarking