The benchmark was specifically testing the hot path of a cached query in their MySQL caching proxy. MySQL wasn’t involved at all.
I agree completely that benchmarks need care, hence my point that the article is disappointing.
The author missed the chance to investigate why removing bounds checks seemed to regress performance by 15%, and instead wrote it off as “close enough.”
It would have been really interesting to find out why, even if it did end up being measurement noise.
"just a cached query" isn't like it's just a hash lookup. You're still doing IO, network protocol decoding, multithreaded synchronization, etc etc. It's certainly not a CPU bound program.
I agree completely that benchmarks need care, hence my point that the article is disappointing.
The author missed the chance to investigate why removing bounds checks seemed to regress performance by 15%, and instead wrote it off as “close enough.”
It would have been really interesting to find out why, even if it did end up being measurement noise.