31 DEC 12

Creating graphs in LibreOffice is a nightmare. They're ugly, nearly impossible to customize and creating pivot tables with data is bloody tedious work. In this post, I'll show you how I took the output of a couple of performance test scripts and turned it into reasonably pretty graphs with a few standard command line tools (gnuplot, awk, a bit of (ba)sh and a Makefile).

The Data

I ran a series of query performance tests against data sets of different sizes. The sets contain 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M and 500M documents. One of the basic constraints is that it has to be easy to add/remove sets. I don't want to faff about with deleting columns or updating pivot tables. If I add a set to my test data, I want it automagically show up in my graphs.

The output of the test script is a simple tab separated file, and looks like this:

[...]