I tend to see people doing weird things and then claim that the change is improving performance. This can be re-ordering instructions to help the compiler, attempting to use multiple cores of your system, writing a memfill in assembly. On the one hand people can be right and the change is making things faster, on the other hand they could use assembly to make things look very complicated, justify their pay, and you might feel awkward to question if it is making any sense.

In the last couple of weeks I have stumbled on some of those things. For some reason I found this bug report about GLIBC changing the memcpy routine for SSE and breaking the flash plugin (because it uses memcpy in the wrong way). The breakage is justified that the new memcpy was optimized and is faster. As Linus points out with his benchmark the performance improvement is mostly just wishful thinking.

Another case was someone providing MIPS optimized pixman code to speed-up all drawing which turned out to be wishful thinking as well…

The conclusion is. If someone claims that things are faster with his patch. Do not simply trust him, make sure he refers to his benchmark, is providing numbers of before and after and maybe even try to run it yourself. If he can not provide this, you should wonder how he measured the speed-up! There should be no place for wishful thinking in benchmarking. This is one of the areas where Apple’s WebKit team is constantly impressing me.