Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by panic 3780 days ago
Cool stuff! Does anyone know why the geometric mean is used for averaging benchmark scores rather than the usual arithmetic mean?
1 comments

I would say that geometric mean is the usual way of averaging benchmark scores. It has the property that a given relative speedup on a component benchmark always has the same effect on the aggregate score. With an arithmetic mean the component benchmarks with a longer runtime will dominate the aggregate. Normalizing the results before applying the arithmetic mean doesn't really help either -- the first X% improvement to a component benchmark would still be valued more than the second X% speedup.