performance-test farm

Hi everyone,

several members of this mailing list mentioned recently it'd be really
useful to have a performance-test farm, that it might improve the
development process and make some changes easier.

I've briefly discussed this with another CSPUG member, who represents a
local company using PostgreSQL for a long time (and that supports
CSPUG), and we've agreed to investigate this a bit further.

I do have a rough idea what it might look like, but I've never built
performance-testing farm for such distributed project. So I'd like to
know what would you expect from such beast. Especially

1) Is there something that might serve as a model?

I've googled to seach if there's some tool but "performance-test
farm" gave me a lot of info about how to breed cows, pigs and goats
on a farm, but that's not very useful in this case I guess.

2) How would you use it? What procedure would you expect?

I mean this should produce regular performance test of the current
sources (and publish it on some website), but the whole point is to
allow developers to do a performance test of their changes before
commit to the main.

How would you expect to deliver these changes to the farm? How would
you define the job? How would you expect to get the results? etc.

Just try to write down a list of steps.

3) Any other features expected?

If you notice any interesting feature, write it down and note
whether it's a 'must have' or a 'nice to have' feature.

I really can't promise anything right now - I have just a very rough
idea how much time/effort/money this might take. So let's see what is
needed to build a 'minimal farm' and if it's feasible with the resources
we can get.

regards
Tomas