Hyperfine is great. I use it sometimes for some quick web page benchmarks:

https://abuisman.com/posts/developer-tools/quick-page-benchm...

As mentioned here in the thread, when you want to go into the single ms optimisations it is not the best approach since there is a lot of overhead especially the way I demonstrate here, but it works very well for some sanity checks.

I've also had a good experience using the 'perf'[^1] tools for when I don't want to install 'hyperfine'. Shameless plug for a small blog post about it as I don't think it is that well known: https://usrme.xyz/tils/perf-is-more-robust-for-repeated-timi....

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[^1]: https://www.mankier.com/1/perf

Perhaps interesting (for some) to note that hyperfine is from the same author as at least a few other "ne{w,xt} generation" command line tools (that could maybe be seen as part of "rewrite it in Rust", but I don't want to paint the author with a brush they disagree with!!): fd (find alternative; https://github.com/sharkdp/fd), bat ("supercharged version of the cat command"; https://github.com/sharkdp/bat), and hexyl (hex viewer; https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl). (And certainly others I've missed!)

Pointing this out because I myself appreciate comments that do this.

For myself, `fd` is the one most incorporated into my own "toolbox" -- used it this morning prior to seeing this thread on hyperfine! So, thanks for all that, sharkdp if you're reading!

Ok, end OT-ness.

Hyperfine is a great tool but when I was using it at Deno to benchmark startup time there was a lot of weirdness around the operating system apparently caching inodes of executables.

If you are looking at shaving sub 20ms numbers, be aware you may need to pull tricks on macos especially to get real numbers.

A capable alternative based on "boring, old" technology is multitime [1]

Back at the time I needed it, it had peak memory usage - hyperfine was not able to show it. Maybe this had changed by now.

[1] https://tratt.net/laurie/src/multitime/