Rigorous Benchmarking in Reasonable Time - Kent Academic Repository

Tomas Kalibera and Richard Jones' paper on how to do benchmarking that's actually meaningful -- presenting results as confidence intervals for effect sizes, with techniques to establish i.i.d. results and work out how many repetitions you need to do. Very nice work for a pretty short paper! (I've spent most of today chasing references from this in the interests of understanding the maths behind it...)

to benchmarking compiler confidence effect-size independence java performance reproducibility statistics vm ... on 26 March 2014

Producing wrong data without doing anything obviously wrong!

Lots of examples of how environmental factors (e.g. environment variable size, room temperature, link order, ASLR...) can affect experimental results, to the tune of 20% or more. Basically: why pretty much any benchmark you've seen in a paper where the effect size isn't huge is probably nonsense.

to benchmarking compiler performance reproducibility research statistics ... on 26 March 2014