On 19 September 2012 12:38, Peter Alexander <peter.alexander.au@gmail.com> wrote:
The fastest execution time is rarely useful to me, I'm almost always much
more interested in the slowest execution time.
In realtime software, the slowest time is often the only important factor,
everything must be designed to tolerate this possibility.
I can also imagine other situations where multiple workloads are competing
for time, the average time may be more useful in that case.

The problem with slowest is that you end up with the occasional OS hiccup or GC collection which throws the entire benchmark off. I see your point, but unless you can prevent the OS from interrupting, the time would be meaningless.

So then we need to start getting tricky, and choose the slowest one that is not beyond an order of magnitude or so outside the average?