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Vance Ingalls 3da8c2e969 perf(producer): hdr benchmark harness — --tags filter, peak heap/RSS tracking, bench:hdr script (#382)
## Summary

Make the existing benchmark harness genuinely useful for HDR perf work: positive `--tags` filter, peak heap/RSS sampling, a `bench:hdr` script, and a perf README documenting the captured April-2026 baseline. Lands first in the Chunk 8 sub-stack so subsequent perf PRs can be measured against a known starting point.

## Why

`Chunk 8A` of `plans/hdr-followups.md`. Wall-clock timing alone can't catch slow memory regressions like an unbounded image cache — peak RSS does. And the existing harness only had `--exclude-tags`, so HDR runs had to wait for unrelated SDR fixtures.

## What changed

**1. Positive `--tags` filter** in `benchmark.ts`. Adds `--tags hdr` so HDR runs don't have to wait for unrelated fixtures. Filters compose: a fixture must match `--tags` (if provided) AND must not match `--exclude-tags`.

**2. Peak heap + RSS tracking** in `executeRenderJob`. A 250 ms periodic `process.memoryUsage()` sampler runs alongside every render and reports `peakRssMb` / `peakHeapUsedMb` in `RenderPerfSummary`. Sampler is `unref`'d and always cleared in `finally` so it never keeps the event loop alive or leaks across jobs. Both fields are optional on the interface for back-compat with serialized older summaries.

**3. `bench:hdr` convenience script** plus a perf README at `tests/perf/README.md` documenting the harness, the new flags, and the captured April-2026 HDR baseline (PQ regression: 34.5 s / 272 MiB RSS, HLG regression: 11.5 s / 227 MiB RSS, both 1080p / 1 worker / 1 run).

The benchmark output table is widened and gains `PeakRSS` / `PeakHeap` columns. A new `avgOrNull` helper preserves `null` in the JSON when no run reported memory (avoids silently coercing missing data to 0 in older snapshots).

No behavior change for non-benchmark renders — the sampler runs in every `executeRenderJob` but its overhead is a single `process.memoryUsage()` call every 250 ms, well below noise.

## Test plan

- [x] `bunx tsc --noEmit -p packages/producer` — clean.
- [x] `bunx oxlint` / `bunx oxfmt --check` on changed files — clean.
- [x] `bun test src/services/` — 60/60 pass (frameDirCache, orchestrator, etc.).
- [x] `bunx tsx src/benchmark.ts --tags hdr --runs 1` — both HDR fixtures render successfully, summary table prints `PeakRSS`/`PeakHeap` columns, per-run output shows new memory line.
- [x] `bunx tsx src/benchmark.ts --tags nonexistent` — exits 1 with a helpful message naming the active filters.

## Stack

Chunk 8A of `plans/hdr-followups.md`. First PR in the Chunk 8 perf sub-stack; subsequent PRs (image cache, logger gating) measured against this baseline.
2026-04-23 14:49:49 -07:00
..
2026-03-21 22:43:56 -07:00

Producer Performance Benchmarks

End-to-end render benchmark harness driven by src/benchmark.ts. Discovers fixtures under packages/producer/tests/<fixture>/ (any directory with a meta.json), runs them through the full producer pipeline, and emits per-stage timing plus peak memory metrics into benchmark-results.json.

The harness is deliberately lightweight — it doesn't enforce thresholds. It's designed for regression spotting: capture a baseline, change something, re-run, eyeball the diff. For pass/fail thresholds see tests/perf/baseline.json and the perf-regression checks in the integration test suite.

Quick start

# Run every non-slow fixture once
cd packages/producer
bun run benchmark

# HDR-only baseline (PQ + HLG fixtures, ~50s on M-series Macs)
bun run bench:hdr

# Average a fixture across multiple runs
bunx tsx src/benchmark.ts --tags hdr --runs 3

# Just the PQ regression
bunx tsx src/benchmark.ts --only hdr-regression

# Skip slow fixtures explicitly (default behavior; here for clarity)
bunx tsx src/benchmark.ts --exclude-tags slow

Results are written to packages/producer/tests/perf/benchmark-results.json and a summary table is printed to stdout.

CLI flags

Flag Description
--runs N Run each fixture N times and average (default: 1).
--only <id> Run a single fixture by directory name.
--tags a,b Positive filter: only fixtures whose meta.json#tags contains any of the listed tags.
--exclude-tags a,b Negative filter: skip fixtures with any matching tag. Defaults to slow.

--tags and --exclude-tags apply independently — a fixture must match the positive filter (if any) and must not match the negative filter.

Reading the output

Each fixture row prints averaged stage timings plus peak memory:

Fixture                       Total   Compile   Extract     Audio   Capture    Encode   PeakRSS  PeakHeap
hdr-hlg-regression          11549ms     187ms     520ms      36ms    8373ms    2394ms    227MiB     69MiB
hdr-regression              34452ms      94ms    1268ms      48ms   27034ms    5914ms    272MiB    118MiB
  • Total — wall-clock time from job submission to mux-complete.
  • Capture — frame extraction + composition + alpha blit (HDR path).
  • Encode — chunked or streaming HDR encoder time (HEVC Main10 for HDR).
  • PeakRSS / PeakHeap — sampled every 250ms inside executeRenderJob from process.memoryUsage(); surfaces gross memory regressions (e.g. unbounded image-cache growth) that wall-clock numbers miss. RSS includes native ffmpeg/Chrome allocations; heap is JS-side V8 only.

HDR baseline (April 2026)

Captured on macOS arm64 (M-series), Bun runtime, 1 worker, default config, single run. These are illustrative — re-baseline locally before comparing your own runs.

Fixture Total Capture Encode PeakRSS PeakHeap Notes
hdr-hlg-regression 11.5s 8.4s (72%) 2.4s (21%) 227 MiB 69 MiB 150 frames, 2 HLG sources
hdr-regression 34.5s 27.0s (78%) 5.9s (17%) 272 MiB 118 MiB 600 frames, 9 PQ sources, shader transition

Capture dominates HDR runs (~72-78%). The second-biggest cost is HEVC Main10 encode. Memory peaks scale with source count and resolution — the PQ regression's nine HDR sources push heap from ~70 MiB → ~120 MiB.

When evaluating an HDR optimization (image cache, gated debug logging, etc.) the metric to watch first is Capture ms-per-frame:

hdr-regression: capture avg 45ms/frame
hdr-hlg-regression: capture avg 56ms/frame

When to re-baseline

  • After landing any change that touches renderOrchestrator.ts, streamingEncoder.ts, the HDR alpha-blit path, or frameDirCache.ts.
  • Before opening a PR that claims a perf win — paste before/after numbers in the PR description.
  • Quarterly, even without code changes, to track infra/dependency drift.

The bench:hdr script is the recommended command for routine HDR perf checks because it filters out non-HDR fixtures (which can be 10× slower without contributing signal to HDR-specific work).