How I found this project? I was looking through the participant and project table when I saw one of my classmate's chosen project, I decided to take a look into that Google open-source website and saw Zopfli as related projects. Which you can find here (https://opensource.google/projects/zopfli) or here (https://github.com/google/zopfli).
First Step: I decided to clone the git repository into one of our class servers, starting with the AArch64 Israel server. After that, I follow their ReadMe instructions posted on their GitHub to build it. But, I was a little bit confused on how to put files and test it, so I did some Googling and found this website (https://ariya.io/2016/06/using-zopfli-to-optimize-png-images) that explains very well how to compile it and execute the file.
Second Step: Once I gather all my results, I was left hanging to see how can I know the profiling time. I did some research and encounter this command gprof which is a "is a performance analysis tool for Unix applications" definition by Wikipedia. Also, I did not know how to use this command since is the first time I learn about it and I found a good website that explains step by step how this command works (https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/08/gprof-tutorial/).
Third Step: I repeated the same steps for the x86_64 Xerxes server. Also, I document all this process and result in my other blog post that you can find here.
Personal Note:
I did encounter some problems while benchmarking this project since I did not realize at the beginning that every time you change your Makefile and you want to see your new changes is better to run make clean before a make all.
Also, finding an open-source that I liked and was curious to work with, it wasn't that easy as I thought. I did find a lot of open-source projects but it was really difficult for me to understand the documentation and put it to test. Because of that, I decided to choose Zopfli because the source code is not that big compare to others and it is relatively easy to read through.
I will be posting my Stage 2 and Stage 3 once I am done with them. I hope you guys come along to this journey with me and enjoy it.