I was inspired by Dylan Beattie’s “We’re Gonna Build a Framework” (go watch it, it’s so good!) to make a song called “We’re Gonna Build a Benchmark”. (Dylan was of course, himself, riffing on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but I think I’ve listened to Dylan’s version more than Billy Joel’s, so Dylan’s are the lyrics I hear in my head.) Sadly, I lack Dylan’s musical talent, so I had to use Suno for the music production. It’s not all cheating, because I wrote the lyrics myself.

The rendered song is here, on Suno.

Lyrics

Throughput, build time, RSS should be fine Latency, P99 Warmups, ready line RAPL, energy CPU, wrong frequency

Cold start, Hot cache, Page fault, disk thrash Sync cost, lock-free For latency Soft swap, core crash Queue depth, load smash Profile, flame graph

We’re gonna build a benchmark ‘cos we wanna use one, but don’t wanna choose one, We’re gonna build a benchmark ‘cos we wanna use one, but don’t wanna choose one,

Heap size, lazy threads Pool size bikesheds Metrics, tracing, Otel excess Pinned cores Sync chores Twist the knob, NUMA on the floor

I/O bound, rebound scores on the ground numbers are not sound Cache pop, head drop, Works on my machine, is it really clean?

Change one little flag Watch the numbers sag Tune, run, tweak, repeat Share the test and shriek Read rows, write rows Stale container woes CPU GPU, what else do I have to say?

Wrk2, hyperfoil, Cache hit, slashdot Mutex, deadlock A/B, baby, Share the code, Why’s it slow in this mode? Data, state-a, I can’t take it anymore

We’re gonna build a benchmark ‘cos we wanna use one, but don’t wanna choose one, We’re gonna build a benchmark ‘cos we wanna use one, but don’t wanna choose one.