avgtime - Small D util for your everyday benchmarking needs

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/23/12 12:51 AM, Manfred Nowak wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>
>> You may want to also print the mode of the distribution,
>> nontrivial but informative
>
> In case of this implementation and according to the given link: trivial
> and noninformative, because
>
> | For samples, if it is known that they are drawn from a symmetric
> | distribution, the sample mean can be used as an estimate of the
> | population mode.
>
> and the program computes the variance as if the values of the sample
> follow a normal distribution, which is symmetric.
>
> Therefore the mode of the sample is of interest only, when the variance
> is calculated wrongly.

Again, benchmarks I've seen are always asymmetric. Not sure why those 
shown here are symmetric. The mode should be very close to the minimum 
(and in fact I think taking the minimum is a pretty good approximation 
of the sought-after time).

Andrei