Add benchmarks for VOTable binary parsing

[stvoutsin]

Following a suggestion from @mhvk in the issue raised here: astropy/astropy#18442
this PR adds some benchmarks for VOTable binary/binary2 parsing to establish a baseline for a follow-up performance-improvement suggestion.

[bsipocz]

Sounds like a nice idea. Thanks.

[mhvk]

Thanks! This looks good to my untrained eye. One small comment about column types, which you can ignore. (But if you do think it is better to follow, then perhaps run flake8 and address the small PEP8 violations.)

[mhvk]

It doesn't probably really matter for the tests, but woudln't you want ra, dec be float? In a way, parsing that fast seems more useful, though I guess you include some in flux_data already.

[stvoutsin]

Thanks for the feedback! I've made some fixes for PEP8 compliance and changed ra/dec to be float32

[pllim]

@mhvk , is your comment addressed? Is this good to merge?

I took the liberty to push a minor commit to sort the imports. Hope you don't mind, @stvoutsin .

Thanks, all!

[pllim]

Oh wait, votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary and votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary2 failed.

[stvoutsin]

@mhvk , is your comment addressed? Is this good to merge?

I took the liberty to push a minor commit to sort the imports. Hope you don't mind, @stvoutsin .

Thanks, all!

Oh no problem thanks for the fix, I should have checked the import sorting as well.

[mhvk]

Yes, having ra and dec as float32 is great, so all good from my side (once tests pass of course!).

[stvoutsin]

Oh wait, votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary and votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary2 failed.

I've made one small change to remove an extra serialization/deserialization step that wasn't needed, perhaps that was causing some kind of memory/timeout issue with 200k rows. Perhaps we can trigger one more run with this change and see if that resolved it?

[pllim]

Now it passes on astropy-dev but fails a lot more on stable astropy... 🧐

[47.39%] ··· ...imeVOTableBooleanFields.time_booleans_binary             failed
[47.52%] ··· ...meVOTableBooleanFields.time_booleans_binary2             failed
[47.64%] ··· ...eVOTableLongStrings.time_long_strings_binary             failed
[47.77%] ··· ...VOTableLongStrings.time_long_strings_binary2             failed
[47.89%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary                  failed
[48.01%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary2                 failed
[48.14%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableNumeric.time_numeric_binary              failed
[48.26%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableNumeric.time_numeric_binary2             failed
[48.39%] ··· ...OTableShortStrings.time_short_strings_binary             failed
[48.51%] ··· ...TableShortStrings.time_short_strings_binary2             failed
[48.64%] ··· ...e.TimeVOTableSmallOverhead.time_small_binary             failed
[48.76%] ··· ....TimeVOTableSmallOverhead.time_small_binary2             failed
[48.88%] ··· ...tringIntensive.time_string_intensive_binary2             failed

[stvoutsin]

Now it passes on astropy-dev but fails a lot more on stable astropy... 🧐

[47.39%] ··· ...imeVOTableBooleanFields.time_booleans_binary             failed
[47.52%] ··· ...meVOTableBooleanFields.time_booleans_binary2             failed
[47.64%] ··· ...eVOTableLongStrings.time_long_strings_binary             failed
[47.77%] ··· ...VOTableLongStrings.time_long_strings_binary2             failed
[47.89%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary                  failed
[48.01%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableMixed.time_mixed_binary2                 failed
[48.14%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableNumeric.time_numeric_binary              failed
[48.26%] ··· votable.TimeVOTableNumeric.time_numeric_binary2             failed
[48.39%] ··· ...OTableShortStrings.time_short_strings_binary             failed
[48.51%] ··· ...TableShortStrings.time_short_strings_binary2             failed
[48.64%] ··· ...e.TimeVOTableSmallOverhead.time_small_binary             failed
[48.76%] ··· ....TimeVOTableSmallOverhead.time_small_binary2             failed
[48.88%] ··· ...tringIntensive.time_string_intensive_binary2             failed

I think the issue with the stable version is that we cannot set the format this way:
votable.get_first_table().format = format_type

Because we run into a KeyError here:
KeyError: 'version_1_3_or_later'

Since when initializing a Table using from_table() I don't think a config is created. My understanding is that this was fixed in astropy/astropy#18366 which is why it worked for the dev version.

I've updated the votable creation step to pass in the table format to the to_xml() call, so can we run the action again to see if it is now fixed?

[pllim]

It is green. Let's get it in then. Thank you!