Go ahead and commit this, but I'll fix it with a follow-up commit. The first thing I did was tweak the numbers so it uses slightly higher values & fewer inputs. That gave a modified-baseline that looks like this,

oliver:~/sandbox/vimap> for i in {1..10}; do testify tests.performance_test | grep speedup; done
.Easy performance test efficiency: 88.6% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 85.6% (1.7x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 90.8% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 90.5% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 88.7% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 88.7% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 89.7% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 84.4% (1.7x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 84.0% (1.7x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 90.7% (1.8x speedup)

I tightened up the timing in pool.py to 0.001 (1ms), which helped a little,

oliver:~/sandbox/vimap> for i in {1..10}; do testify tests.performance_test | grep speedup; done
.Easy performance test efficiency: 90.4% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 90.3% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 91.7% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 89.4% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 89.7% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 90.7% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 90.6% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 91.6% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 91.8% (1.8x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 93.1% (1.9x speedup)

Then, I tightened the _IDLE_TIMEOUT in real_worker_process.py from 0.02 to 0.001, and got these numbers,

oliver:~/sandbox/vimap> for i in {1..10}; do testify tests.performance_test | grep speedup; done
.Easy performance test efficiency: 94.2% (1.9x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 97.8% (2.0x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 93.1% (1.9x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 95.2% (1.9x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 98.7% (2.0x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 92.8% (1.9x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 95.0% (1.9x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 94.8% (1.9x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 97.3% (1.9x speedup)
.Easy performance test efficiency: 94.6% (1.9x speedup)


I'll make sure stuff isn't spinning too much, then commit that.