Kyle Schmitt wrote:
> Err wait, the way you phrased your benchmarks is a bit confusing, post
> the total time for each by bitness(32 or 64) by cpu.
>   

It's more complicated than that as I don't have 32 and 64 bit systems on 
each of my systems so I had to compare slightly different machines. 
Anyway, the 64bit 25% slowdown in this benchmark isn't such a big deal 
in my opinion, I'm more interested as why a virtual machine based on 
user-mode-linux can be 2x faster than the real hardware it runs on... So 
I wondered if someone did at least see such behavior before I dig more 
(running other benchmarks...).

> [...]
> One final thing, when benchmarking, it may suck to wait for many runs
> to go by, but you really need to do more than two runs :)
> You probably already know all this, but still, for passers by, drop to
> single user mode if possible, make sure no extra processes are
> running, and run the test as many times as you can.  Maybe that's
> four, but hopefully it's twenty, or a hundred.
>
>   

The Quiz #157 benchmark (see 
http://tastyspleen.net/~billk/ruby/quiz/157-smallest-circle/benchmark/, 
the 157_bencharmk_2.rb file) runs each algorithm 10 times on 4 different 
data sets. I used the algorithm which takes a nearly constant time 
(FRANK) for all sets and does the most computations. So this was in fact 
at least 4 * 2 = 8 runs of 10 times the same code.

Lionel