Benchmark Go performance with Sweet and Benchstat
Introduction
Overview
Launch an Arm-based c4a-standard-4 instance
Launch an Intel Emerald Rapids c4-standard-8 instance
Install Go, Sweet, and Benchstat
Benchmark types and metrics
Manually run benchmarks
Manually run Benchstat
Install the automated benchmark and Benchstat runner
Run the automated benchmark and Benchstat runner
Next Steps

  Log an issue

  Fork and edit

  Discuss on Discord

Overview of Go benchmarking tools

This section shows you how to measure, collect, and compare Go performance data across different CPU architectures. These techniques help developers and system architects make informed infrastructure decisions for their Go applications.

You’ll gain hands-on experience with:

  • Go Benchmarks - standardized definitions for popular Go applications, using Go’s built-in testing framework.

  • Sweet - a benchmark runner that automates execution and formats results for comparison across multiple environments.

  • Benchstat - a statistical comparison tool that analyzes benchmark results to identify meaningful performance differences between systems.

Benchmarking is critical for modern software development because it allows you to do the following:

  • Quantify the impact of code changes
  • Compare performance across hardware architectures
  • Make data-driven decisions about infrastructure
  • Identify optimization opportunities in your application code

In this Learning Path, you’ll compare performance using two four-core GCP instance types:

  • The Arm-based c4a-standard-4
  • The Intel-based c4-standard-8
Note

Arm-based c4a-standard-4 instances and Intel-based c4-standard-8 instances both utilize four cores. Both instances are categorized by GCP as members a series that demonstrates consistent high performance. The main difference between the two is that c4a has 16 GB of RAM, while c4 has 30 GB of RAM. This Learning Path uses equivalent core counts as an example of performance comparison.

Back
Next