Profiling != benchmarking. Profiling is great to find _where_ you should setup benchmarks in your code. If you've got code in a path that consistently takes <1m

Profiling != benchmarking. Profiling is great to find _where_ you should setup benchmarks in your code. If you've got code in a path that consistently takes <1ms and isn't called enough times to significantly add to the profiling of the application, would it really warrant benchmark comparisons? As others have said, benchmark frameworks are great. Many systems have support for high-resolution perf counters these days. Just ran a quick test on my local system, it's able to make a timer accurate to 100ns. Benchmark frameworks let you hook into your code in such a way that you can easily run a single fragment 10k-10m times and produce an analysis of the result that includes mean time, std deviation, and memory allocations. They usually let you setup a side by side comparison so you can directly compare 2+ methods. If you use a language with a JIT then good frameworks for those include a warmup period to get the best-JIT version of the code in place before collecting data.