@isaacs Excuse my previous post that has now been removed. Had stepped away from my keyboard while typing it during which you posted the above.

Edward Tufte has a chapter devoted to graphical integrity in _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_. There is one line in particular that I like:

> The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graphic itself, should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities represented.

So what is it we are trying to measure? The optimal scenario is that each function call takes zero time to run. Zero is our baseline for performance, and the goal we should try to reach. It would be easy to represent the amount of effort that should be spent on a given topic by the amount of area under the line.

By inverting the measurements perception is warped by how much has been achieved. My changes to buffer write methods are a perfect example. Their performance increased by ~4x, but what was the real gain? A grand total of 119 nanoseconds per call.

I'm worried about this becoming another v8 benchmark. Those are pretty and make v8 look awesome, but are absolutely worthless for analysis. On arewefastyet.com you'll notice that v8 scores ~14300 while Firefox (JM+TI) scores ~8700. This gives absolutely no bearing on actual performance. It could be the difference between 5 or 0.5 seconds to run a function.

We also need to discuss the validity of the values that are being measured. Right now tests are being run once, and at rather short interval. These would be of little use to record and report. If we're going to store values in a database for reporting, then I'd suggest that each test run until the standard error < 5-10% of the mean. While storing all data points, or even a histogram, is beyond what we could analyse, I think that mean, median and quartiles would be the most important. Min and max are pretty much useless for our purposes.