> measuring performance always seemed to be a very hard task It's not hard: it's either easy, or impossible, depending on the culture at your shop. At the bas

> measuring performance always seemed to be a very hard task It's not hard: it's either easy, or impossible, depending on the culture at your shop. At the basic level it's trivial - you instrument code and interpret the results against the HW and lower level machine counters. Depending on $lang you have many good libraries for this kicking around, the hard part is working with a corp that values performance (99% do not) so none of the required mindset and surrounding infra will be setup to permit this in any useful capacity.