Nothing is a good performance metric apart from profiling. Preferably with runtime conditions (CPU load, memory bandwidth, etc.) closely mirroring production se

Nothing is a good performance metric apart from profiling. Preferably with runtime conditions (CPU load, memory bandwidth, etc.) closely mirroring production setting(s). It's very easy to forget things like memory bandwidth, inter-core/CPU links, etc. are all limited resources. And that on real systems resources are shared.