Provide a way to benchmark speed performance of LASFile.read

[kinverarity1]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
This is subjective, but I think it's fair to say LASFile.read is too slow. Compared to the performance that parsing a similarly-sized table using pandas.read_csv, it is very obviously slow. One of the big problems in improving this is the lack of reliable benchmarks to ensure we are improving performance.

Describe the solution you'd like
A simple way to see the performance of LASFile.read for one branch compared to another branch, in a reliable way. Then we can try out different code in attempts to improve the performance and see whether we're getting anywhere!

Describe alternatives you've considered
I've tried doing profiling locally but I've found depending on what else is happening on my machine at the time, the speeds vary quite widely. I also have no experience in setting up this kind of thing so am keen for any ideas.

** Solution **

• PR Add benchmark test for the speed of reading a LAS file #449 implements a benchmark
• Add description of how to compare benchmark times to Sphinx documentation #457 Add description of how to compare benchmarks to Sphinx documentation
• Set up graphical indication of benchmark results on GitHub Python CI #458 Set up CI benchmarks somehow

[kinverarity1]

Implemented in #449 but could be improved - I've added a checklist to the issue description above.

[dcslagel]

How about we move the checklist items to each be an issue. The benefit is that they will be visible and track-able at the issue level.

[kinverarity1]

Yep good idea I'll do that 👍

[kinverarity1]

See #457 and #458 for remaining tasks. Closing this one.