I disagree. If you write ten benchmarks, and they finish in the same order on all platforms, the median really doesn't give you any information apart from how

I disagree. If you write ten benchmarks, and they finish in the same order on all platforms, the median really doesn't give you any information apart from how the middle one did. At least the mean will be changed if the slowest benchmark for some reason is a lot slower on one platform. In this case, there was some variation, but for the most part it looks like the median is just one of 4 or 5 middling benchmarks in all cases, so you're really just removing data, if anything. The box plot is a good choice here. What I would like to see is a graph plotting time against {VM} x {benchmark size} to see how each platform scales within a benchmark. With the data you've got, apart from confusing me a little by including the mean and median, you did a good job presenting it. I'd love to see why some platforms do so much well than others in some cases (except JRuby which everyone knows is a memory hog), but this seems way out of scope for this article. :)