Geotiff benchmark

Code for running benchmarks for different compression algorithms in GDAL's GeoTIFF driver. More information on the benchmark and results in the related article on my website.

Running your own benchmarks

You can run your own benchmarks using a prepared Docker environment, or just locally on your own computer.

Local

To run the benchmark locally, add the GeoTIFF files you want to benchmark with to the input_files directory, and run the benchmark script:

python3 geotiff_benchmark.py

A few notes:

• You may have to run the script as root, because it calls itself using perf stat to time the benchmarks.
• Make sure you have GDAL properly installed. To test zstd compression at least GDAL 2.4.0-dev is required.
• Modify the config.ini file to suit your needs. See the GeoTIFF File Format for valid settings.
• Don't have any sample files? Download the demo files I used (50Mb files with different data types) from here.
• Use --repetitions to set the number of repetitions, --input to define input directory with tif files, and --config to set the the correct config file.

Using Docker

To run the benchmarks using Docker, use the included Dockerfile to build an image containing a lightweight GDAL 2.4.0dev with zstd compression compiled in. The Makefile contains some shortcuts to build the image:

make build

Builds the docker image and tags it geotiff-benchmark. Use make shell to run the container and a get a shell, make test to run a minimal benchmark using the settings in config-minimal.ini. To run the full benchmark in the container:

make benchmark

A few notes:

• While building the Docker image the sample files are automatically downloaded.
• In order to get perf stat to work inside a container I needed to run the container with the --privileged flag, so that's included in the make benchmark command as well.