Benchmarks

CLI Benchmarks

The ɳSelf CLI ships with Go benchmark tests for the top-5 commands. These benchmarks measure cobra dispatch overhead, flag-parsing cost, and early business-logic traversal, not external I/O (Docker, network, filesystem beyond a temp dir).

Running Benchmarks

# Run all benchmarks once (quick check)
go test -mod=vendor -bench=. -benchtime=1x -benchmem ./cmd/commands/

# Run a specific benchmark (3s per b.N, 3 runs)
go test -mod=vendor -bench=BenchmarkVersion -benchtime=3s -count=3 -benchmem ./cmd/commands/

# Run all 5 primary benchmarks
go test -mod=vendor \
  -bench='BenchmarkVersion$|BenchmarkInit$|BenchmarkBuild$|BenchmarkPluginInstallCached$|BenchmarkDoctor$' \
  -benchtime=3s -count=3 -benchmem \
  ./cmd/commands/

Benchmark Files

File	Benchmarks	What it measures
version_bench_test.go	BenchmarkVersion, BenchmarkVersionJSON, BenchmarkVersionHelp	Cobra startup + version string format
init_bench_test.go	BenchmarkInit, BenchmarkInitFlagParsing	Flag parse + early input sanitisation for nself init
build_bench_test.go	BenchmarkBuild, BenchmarkBuildCheck, BenchmarkBuildFlagParsing	Flag parse + FindNSelfRoot for nself build
plugin_install_bench_test.go	BenchmarkPluginInstallCached, BenchmarkPluginList, BenchmarkPluginFlagParsing	Plugin dispatch + gate overhead
doctor_bench_test.go	BenchmarkDoctor, BenchmarkDoctorDeep, BenchmarkDoctorFlagParsing	Doctor command dispatch (stub RunE, no Docker required)

Emitting Results for CI

Set BENCH_RESULTS_FILE=/path/to/output.ndjson before running benchmarks to emit NDJSON result entries. The CI pipeline (perf.yml) uses this to feed perf-compare.sh.

BENCH_RESULTS_FILE=/tmp/bench.ndjson \
  go test -mod=vendor -bench=. -benchtime=3s ./cmd/commands/

SLO Targets

Per F16-PERF-SLOS.md:

Command	p95 SLO
nself version	≤ 150ms
nself build	≤ 5s
nself doctor	≤ 8s

These benchmarks measure pre-check overhead only. Full command execution (including Docker and network) is measured by the integration test suite.

CI Pipeline

cli/.github/workflows/perf.yml runs on every PR and push to main:

• Builds the darwin/arm64 binary and checks against hard limits: ≤35 MB uncompressed, ≤6 MB compressed.
• Runs the 5 benchmark suites and uploads results as artifacts.
• A >10% binary size growth without the size-grow-approved PR label fails the gate.

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