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Today I stumbled across a neat CLI for benchmark comparing CLIs for speed: hyperfine. By David @sharkdp Peter.
It's a great tool in your arsenal for quick benchmarks in the terminal.

It's written in Rust and is easily installed with brew install hyperfine. For example, let's compare a couple of different commands for compressing a file into a new compressed file. I know it's comparing apples and oranges but it's just an example:

(click to see full picture)

It basically executes the following commands over and over and then compares how long each one took on average:

• apack log.log.apack.gz log.log
• gzip -k log.log
• zstd log.log
• brotli -3 log.log

If you're curious about the ~results~ apples vs oranges, the final result is:

▶ ls -lSh log.log*
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  staff    25M Jul  3 10:39 log.log
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  staff   2.4M Jul  5 22:00 log.log.apack.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  staff   2.4M Jul  3 10:39 log.log.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  staff   2.2M Jul  3 10:39 log.log.zst
-rw-r--r--  1 peterbe  staff   2.1M Jul  3 10:39 log.log.br

The point is that you type hyperfine followed by each command in quotation marks. The --prepare is run for each command and you can also use --cleanup="{cleanup command here}.

It's versatile so it doesn't have to be different commands but it can be: hyperfine "python optimization1.py" "python optimization2.py" to compare to Python scripts.

🎵 You can also export the output to a Markdown file. Here, I used:

▶ hyperfine "apack log.log.apack.gz log.log" "gzip -k log.log" "zstd log.log" "brotli -3 log.log" --prepare="rm -fr log.log.*" --export-markdown log.compress.md
▶ cat log.compress.md | pbcopy

and it becomes this:

tl;dr; Here's a useful bash script to avoid starting something when its already running as a ghost process.

Huey is a great little Python library for doing background tasks. It's like Celery but much lighter, faster, and easier to understand.

What cost me almost an hour of hair-tearing debugging today was that I didn't realize that a huey daemon process had gotten stuck in the background with code that wasn't updating as I made changes to the tasks.py file in my project. I just couldn't understand what was going on.

The way I start my project is with honcho which is a Python Foreman clone. The Procfile looks something like this:

elasticsearch: cd /Users/peterbe/dev/PETERBECOM/elasticsearch-7.7.0 && ./bin/elasticsearch -q
web: ./bin/run.sh web
minimalcss: cd minimalcss && PORT=5000 yarn run start
huey: ./manage.py run_huey --flush-locks --huey-verbose
adminui: cd adminui && yarn start
pulse: cd pulse && yarn run dev

And you start that with simply typing:

honcho start

When you Ctrl-C, it kills all those processes but somehow somewhere it doesn't always kill everything. Restarting the computer isn't a fun alternative.

So, to prevent my sanity from draining I wrote this script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eo pipefail

# This is used to make sure that before you start huey, 
# there isn't already one running the background.
# It has happened that huey gets lingering stuck as a 
# ghost and it's hard to notice it sitting there 
# lurking and being weird.

bad() {
    echo "Huey is already running!"
    exit 1
}

good() {
    echo "Huey is NOT already running"
    exit 0
}

ps aux | rg huey | rg -v 'rg huey' | rg -v 'huey-isnt-running.sh' && bad || good

(If you're wondering what rg is; it's short for ripgrep)

And I change my Procfile accordingly:

-huey: ./manage.py run_huey --flush-locks --huey-verbose
+huey: ./bin/huey-isnt-running.sh && ./manage.py run_huey --flush-locks --huey-verbose

There really isn't much rocket science or brain surgery about this blog post but I hope it inspires someone who's been in similar trenches that a simple bash script can make all the difference.