Mudlet is committed to providing a fast and responsive display for our users, and we want to make sure that it stays that way even as we add new features and improvements. That’s why we’ve recently conducted some performance benchmarking to ensure that Mudlet’s display remains quick!
Last year we worked on making Mudlet more accessible to all users, regardless of their ability or disability. This work will be released in the coming 4.17 update. Initially, we were worried that this might slow down the display, but our performance benchmarking showed that it did not have any negative impact. In fact, we found that improving the word wrapping algorithm (a separate, unrelated change to accessibility work) had a much bigger impact on display speed.
To ensure consistent and stable performance testing, we couldn’t use Github Actions (the cloud) for this benchmarking because Github does not guarantee the same performance from one run to another. Instead, we used a Raspberry Pi 4B. This ensures consistent hardware performance from run to run, and also ensures we can continue doing the tests for a long while into the future, since if one Pi goes down, we can easily replace it with the same model.
We perform performance testing on every single change that is committed to our development branch, and we publish the resulting chart. All of the underlying data is available as well.
This performance benchmarking joins other automated testing we are already doing, including C++ unit tests, Lua unit tests, and visual tests done with RainforestQA. We are committed to ensuring the quality and stability of Mudlet, and these testing efforts are a big part of that commitment.
Unfortunately, the word wrapping improvements also had other issues, so we’ve had to pull them for the time being. However, we’re glad that we had the performance benchmarking setup in place, as it helped us identify this issue and take steps to address it.
We’ll continue to monitor performance and make sure that Mudlet’s display remains fast and responsive for all users. Thank you for your support and for using Mudlet!
Enjoy Mudlet,
Mudlet Makers
