Re: dogtail-devel Using dogtail to drive GUIs for benchmarks

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 13:55 -0400, William Cohen wrote: 
> Hi all,
> 
> It seems like dogtail would be a good way to automate running a GUI 
> benchmark. Has anyone used dogtail to drive GUIs for collecting 
> benchmarking information, e.g. how long it takes to start up or shutdown 
> an GUI application?

Good idea.

You'll need to be careful - Dogtail automatically adds delays in a few
places (to deal with various race conditions, and to better simulate an
actual human).  The amount of a delay is configurable.

Also, turning on accessibility and probing with Dogtail is going to have
a performance impact on your application - hopefully not much, but it
will have an effect.

With these caveats, it should be possible to use Dogtail to detect when
an application's UI has finished appearing, and hence get a more real
startup time for the app.  Similarly, it should be possible to measure
the time taken between clicking on "Quit" and the related process
finally going away.

Hope this helps
Dave