> They are benchmarks, just not microbenchmarks. Actual application performance is the gold standard for benchmarks. This depends on your intended purpose of t

> They are benchmarks, just not microbenchmarks. Actual application performance is the gold standard for benchmarks. This depends on your intended purpose of the benchmark. If you want to evaluate performance of a whole system, sure. But one often does benchmarks to find parts of the system that are critical to performance so that you can do further optimizations or do change in the software architecture to avoid these critical performance hotsports. For this case other benchmarks that allow an easy fine-grained interpretation of the data are surely better.