Benchmarking with Criterium, performance tips, and other tools

In this recipe, we will learn how to test, measure, and improve the performance of your application. We will show you a Clojure-based benchmark tool.

Getting ready

To use Criterium, we need to add the criterium library in your project.clj as follows:

(defproject performance-example "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT" 
  :description "FIXME: write description" 
  :url "http://example.com/FIXME" 
  :license {:name "Eclipse Public License" 
            :url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"} 
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.8.0"] 
                 [criterium "0.4.4"]]) 

Then, restart your REPL.

How to do it...

Here, we will show you how to test the performance of your code using Criterium.

Using Criterium

Criterium is a micro benchmark tool for measuring the computation time of Clojure expressions.

It performs given expressions multiple times and reports statistical information including means and std-deviations of execution time. Criterium...