I discovered your benchmarking tool today and it looks really cool. I'm in a bit of a unique situation in that I wish to test on a platform that has neither MySQL or GD installed. I believe I can get around the MySQL requirement by giving it an IP to a remote machine running MySQL. Although I haven't seen it use GD yet, I see it in the code.

One solution would be to make the GD stuff optional, and use a DB abstraction layer to allow use of any DB, including SQLite which is what we use.

But a better solution is probably to have the application be in two parts. One part that must run on the system being tested in order to gain data about that system, etc., and one part that runs on the system doing the testing. Both could be run on the same machine, but it would be more of a real-world test I would think if you were making the requests remotely. I haven't explored it in depth, but I'm sure this functionality is not likely to be difficult to achieve (maybe it's already possible.)

Actually it occurs to me that without MySQL libraries compiled into PHP, I probably can't make even a remote connection to it. In that case, not only would it need a remote system, but it would need to proxy the results through that system for storage.

In my brief usage so far, I'm thinking that it might be beneficial to add some extra tags around data in order to allow formatting via CSS rather than modifying the PHP code itself. For instance, when it lists out the individual test times in a bar separated list, I would like to be able to list them one per line. Looking at the html source, I see I could set the bold tag to display:block but that would force the result value to the next line as well. If each result had something like <span class="result"></span> around it, it could be formatted the way a person wants via CSS.

When viewing the results from previous tests, it gives the summary only. Ultimately I would like to view not only the individual time results, but compare them to one or more other tests. It should be simple, add checkboxes next to the results, check off a few, and click a button to view them in a table for comparison. On a related note, while I can download the results as CSV, the fine details are stored in serialized php format which Excel can't read.

I'm a PHP developer and would be open to assisting you with implementing some of these things if you can paint me a picture of how the code is organized and structured.

Michael

One solution would be to make the GD stuff optional, and use a DB abstraction layer to allow use of any DB, including SQLite which is what we use.

The GD code is just for the fancy dynamic output buttons.  It's not required to run any of the tests.

and use a DB abstraction layer to allow use of any DB, including SQLite which is what we use.

I'll give this some thought, and see if I get any other requests for engines other than mysql.

But a better solution is probably to have the application be in two parts. One part that must run on the system being tested in order to gain data about that system, etc., and one part that runs on the system doing the testing. Both could be run on the same machine, but it would be more of a real-world test I would think if you were making the requests remotely. I haven't explored it in depth, but I'm sure this functionality is not likely to be difficult to achieve (maybe it's already possible.)

This is not the way the script is designed currently, but should be possible with some modfication.  Since the overhead for the script itself is so small, I can't think of any 'accuracy' benefits, but aggregating the results from several machines would be nice.  The script is open source, so if you want to have a go, just please share with me so I can make it available to others

In my brief usage so far, I'm thinking that it might be beneficial to add some extra tags around data in order to allow formatting via CSS rather than modifying the PHP code itself. For instance, when it lists out the individual test times in a bar separated list, I would like to be able to list them one per line. Looking at the html source, I see I could set the bold tag to display:block but that would force the result value to the next line as well. If each result had something like <span class="result"></span> around it, it could be formatted the way a person wants via CSS.

Most of the basic styling is already in CSS, but I understand your request.  If you either make the mods and send them to me, or list the areas that would be logical for 'span' tags, I'll add the changes to the code and css sheet.

When viewing the results from previous tests, it gives the summary only. Ultimately I would like to view not only the individual time results, but compare them to one or more other tests. It should be simple, add checkboxes next to the results, check off a few, and click a button to view them in a table for comparison. On a related note, while I can download the results as CSV, the fine details are stored in serialized php format which Excel can't read.

Adding more functionality to the existing tests is on the road map.  To your point the data exists, it's just serialized, so when the new functionality is put in place, it will decode that data and chart/graph it between tests.

I'm a PHP developer and would be open to assisting you with implementing some of these things if you can paint me a picture of how the code is organized and structured.

I would welcome the help.  Unfortunately I have not had much time in the past few months to work on this project.  It basically does what "I" need it to now, so feedback like yours helps to see how others want to use it.  Please let me know if you have specific questions, and send any improvements you make my way.

Take care...