On 2013-02-20, at 01:25, Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Camillo Bruni camillobruni@gmail.com wrote:
The most annoying piece is Time machine and its disk access, I sometimes forget to suspend it, but it was off during the tinyBenchmark.
One simple approach is to run the benchmark three times and to discard the best and the worst results.
that is as good as taking the first one... if you want decent results measure >30 times and do the only scientific correct thing: avg + std deviation?
If the benchmark takes very little time to run and you're trying to avoid background effects then your approach won't necessarily work either.
true, but the deviation will most probably give you exactly that feedback. if you increase the runs but the quality of the result doesn't improve you know that you're dealing with some systematic error source.
This approach is simply more scientific and less home-brewed.