Go has first-class benchmarking built into the testing package. go test -bench=. is enough to get started. The hard part isn’t running benchmarks — it’s writing ones that measure what you intend to measure. These are the patterns I’ve found essential and the mistakes I’ve made repeatedly enough to write down. ...
I spent a morning once very proud of a benchmark showing our new order-matching path had p99 latency of 180µs, down from 340µs. It was a 47% improvement. I presented it in a team meeting. An engineer asked one question: “Is that closed-loop or open-loop?” I didn’t know what that meant. The benchmark was worthless. ...
After writing about the Disruptor’s design, the obvious question is: how much faster is it, really? “Faster” is not a useful answer. Let’s look at actual numbers under controlled conditions. This is a benchmarking exercise, not a recommendation. The right data structure depends on your use case. The goal here is to understand the performance characteristics of each under different contention patterns. ...