Benchmark in Milliseconds

Oct 5, 2026

How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:

• Milliseconds are integers ranging from 1 to 999. Enough precision to notice even a small improvement, and easy to scan visually. No need for different units or floating points (compare 1.31s with 239ms).
• Anything faster than, say, 10ms risks being skewed by fixed costs (e.g, interpreter startup). Hundreds of milliseconds is an eternity for a computer, usually enough to make one-off overheads irrelevant without using fancier (= less robust) techniques to explicitly account for them.
• For a human, hundreds of milliseconds is fast, but noticeable. Pushing numbers into human-perceptible range allows me to use my intuitive sense of time and speed, it doesn’t rely exclusively on numeracy. It’s plain fun to see, as a result of optimization work, how a previously lagging CLI command becomes “instant”.
• But anything longer than a second makes iterating on the benchmark slower than it needs to be. Running a benchmark 10 times in a row to eyeball variance should be fast!

The imminently-to-be-stated assumption here is that the purpose of benchmarking isn’t so much a precise measurement of performance, but rather providing the author with enough intuition to make a correct decision.