What are the benchmarks and ghh-pages branches for?

[evevkovacs]

I setup my project using the project template and committed a bunch of code. I have 2 branches in my repo that I did not add myself and was wondering how they got there and what they are for. They are called benchmarks and gh-pages. They are a few commits ahead, and many behind my main branch.
Should I delete them, merge them, or ..? When I change the main branch, I seem to be adding new commits to these branches. Can you please point me to some documentation that explains what is going on? Thanks

[drewoldag]

Hello there, great question! We do have some documentation that describes the benchmarks and gh-pages branches. But at a high level those two branches a meant for tracking performance history and displaying the benchmarking charts.

The documentation page that covers this info is here: https://lincc-ppt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/practices/ci_benchmarking.html

You are not obligated to take any action with those branches at this point. In theory they should be maintained automatically by the various continuous integration workflows that are running either nightly, when you push a commit to a PR, or when you merge a development branch into main.

If you're interested in having the performance metrics viewable via a github-pages page, there is a little bit of additional setup required. It's called out in the documentation here: https://lincc-ppt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/practices/ci_benchmarking.html#set-up in the "Important" section.

And if you're just interested in seeing what one of those pages looks like, here are some performance metrics for the LSDB project: https://astronomy-commons.github.io/lsdb/#/