Air Speed Velocity (asv) is a tool to benchmark a project's performance. These notes could be used as a complement to its documentation.

Many open source projects use asv, and they run the benchmarks on separate servers. The results are published on yet another server.

The benchmarks that asv runs are short python scripts that call the project's functions or methods. It needs a JSON configuration file for it to work. Then the result of the tests are stored in JSON format files as well, and they can grow quite large. Then asv displays the results in a web frontend. So, it normally needs a host.

Before installing asv, an environment must be created and activated. The library has a command asv quickstart that creates a “skeleton” (some files) that you need to edit in order to benchmark your project. When you run this command, it first asks you about the configuration that you want.

There is an example in the documentation. One needs to edit the file asv.conf.json that was created with asv quickstart to run it.

You can use the benchmarks already written on benchmarks.py, but make sure that asv.conf.json has "repo": “https://github.com/airspeed-velocity/asv.git", also “branches”: [“main”], and that “environment_type" matches your environment.

The first time you run asv, it will ask you for details about your machine. Follow the basic commands on the documentation to run and view the results.

In order to run asv with a real project, it needs to build it. So the project needs to be a distribution package (or “installable”). I used setuptools.

So, the project needs to have a structure and a file with its configuration. You also need to install a package called build to your environment. The configuration can be handled with just the pyproject.toml file.

Remove the "//" (comment) on asv.conf.json to use pyproject.toml and not setup.py.

In order to To run only one benchmark, you need this command: