Writing Effective Benchmarks

Learn to create reliable, meaningful benchmarks that provide actionable performance insights for your Go applications.

Overview

Effective benchmarking is the foundation of performance engineering. This section teaches you how to write benchmarks that accurately measure performance, avoid common pitfalls, and provide consistent results.

What You'll Learn

• Basic Benchmarks: Fundamental benchmarking patterns and structure
• Sub-benchmarks: Organizing complex benchmark suites
• Parallel Benchmarks: Testing concurrent performance characteristics
• Best Practices: Avoiding measurement errors and ensuring reliability

Key Principles

Reliability

• Consistent results across runs
• Proper warmup and measurement periods
• Statistical significance

Accuracy

• Measuring the right things
• Avoiding compiler optimizations that skew results
• Proper resource allocation

Meaningfulness

• Testing realistic scenarios
• Measuring user-relevant metrics
• Providing actionable insights

Getting Started

Begin with Basic Benchmarks to learn the fundamentals of Go benchmarking, then explore Sub-benchmarks for organizing complex test suites, and Parallel Benchmarks for testing concurrent scenarios.