I agree with your criticisms. I wrote this last night and submitted this morning, but after reflection, I even made some edits. For example, I started by saying

I agree with your criticisms. I wrote this last night and submitted this morning, but after reflection, I even made some edits. For example, I started by saying that the first graph was "wrong". Upon reflection, it's not. I think more accurately, it just doesn't represent what people think it does. If you Google search for "apache bench gnuplot", you'll find a very similar gnuplot template that has been circulated for a very long time, but everyone seems to think that the resulting plot is response time over time. I'm definitely going to follow up on the issue. I'm a mediocre programmer, so gnuplot is pretty hard for me, but I keep having these "ah ha" moments. My next post will look at each graph in more detail and try to explain just what is being shown in each.