Performance

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 31 May 2014 at 14:01:52 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 5/30/14, 11:36 PM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> As well as the average (mean), you must provide standard 
>> deviation and
>> degrees of freedom so that a proper error analysis and t-tests 
>> are
>> feasible. Or put it another way: even if you quote a mean with 
>> knowing
>> how many in the sample and what the spread is you cannot judge 
>> the error
>> and so cannot make deductions or inferences.
>
> No. Elapsed time in a benchmark does not follow a Student or 
> Gaussian distribution. Use the mode or (better) the minimum. -- 
> Andrei

Well... It depends on what you're looking to do with the result. 
As you say though, micro-benchmarks of code-quality should always 
be judged on the minimum of a large sample.