Tim Holy <tim.h...@gmail.com> added the comment:

> And I hope that Tim Holy is interested too :-)

Sure, I'll bite :-). On the topic of which statistic to show, I am a real fan 
of the histogram. As has been pointed out, timing in the real world can be 
pretty complicated, and I don't think it does anyone good to hide that 
complexity. Even in cases where machines aren't busy doing other things, you 
can get weird multimodal distributions. A great example (maybe not relevant to 
a lot of Python benchmarks...) is in multithreaded algorithms where the main 
thread is both responsible for scheduling other threads and for a portion of 
the work. Even in an almost-idle machine, you can get little race conditions 
where the main thread decides to pick up some work instants before another 
thread starts looking for more work. That can generate peaks in the histogram 
that are separated by the time for one "unit" of work.

But if you have to quote one and only one number, I'm a fan of the minimum (as 
long as you can trust it---which relies on assuming that you've accurately 
calibrated away all the overhead of your timing apparatus, and not any more).

----------

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue45261>
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