
A browser benchmark that has your back: Robohornet - thisisblurry
http://paulirish.com/2012/a-browser-benchmark-that-has-your-back-robohornet/
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nnethercote
Oh god, just when web people were starting to understand how to create good
benchmarks ([https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane-
minus...](https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/24/octane-minus-v8/)),
now we're going back to 1980s microbenchmark hell.

Doesn't anyone read Hennessy and Patterson any more? The best benchmarks are
real apps, not crappy little microbenchmarks that measure a single thing.

(Can you hear that thud, thud, thud? It's the sound of me beating my head
against my desk.)

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kevingadd
Some of the tests are indeed pretty awful. The canvas clearing test doesn't
even draw anything, so it's literally the equivalent of benchmarking an empty
for loop...

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nnethercote
Superb!

Also, they say "The current items that RoboHornet tests captures the major
pain points of jQuery, Google Apps, Google Maps, Ember, Handlebars and
Cappuccino" but one of the tests is "Calculating primes from 2 to N". Srsly.
Hennessy and Patterson specifically mention the Sieve of Erastosthenes (a
common prime number finding algorithm) as an example of a bad toy benchmark.

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ojiikun
Doesn't run that well on my android phone, since my browser has only 2 modes
of pop-up handling: deny all and confirm each.

In firefox-ESR on Win7-64 it seems to get stuck in one of the SVG tests,
unless it's supposed to take an extraordinarily long time (I killed it after
15+ minutes).

Neat idea, though. I love having a great go-to benchmark for web, so I have a
good baseline for expectations when whipping up mobile sites.

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pav3l
<http://www.robohornet.org/> doesn't even load on IE7

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frozenport
How do browser benchmarks account for incorrectly drawn or spaced items. Could
I write a browser that will ignore everything except the elapsed time measure?

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kevingadd
Nice to see getters/setters in there. Performance for them is absolutely
abysmal in modern runtimes. :(

EDIT: Is it my imagination or is it really difficult to find a link to
RobotHornet itself in the OP?

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zellyn
Click the large image.

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pohl
Nice idea. It won't run on my iPad 2, though.

