[OT] benchmarking "typical" programs

[Nicholas Clark]

Sorry to ask an off topic question...

It's very easy to write a benchmark for a particular thing.
It's fairly easy to get such a beast to show that a particular change will
speed that benchmark up.

But

Such benchmarks typically don't actually represent realistic code. They
usually don't throw enough data around or create enough objects to start
to stress the memory subsystems. And they don't do enough different things
to thrash any CPU instruction cache. So It's much harder to show whether a
particular change slows everything else down meaningfully enough to not be
worth it.

So

Does the mighty hive mind of london.pm have any suggestions (preferably
useful) of what to use for benchmarking "typical" Perl programs?

Needs to do realistic things on a big enough scale to stress a typical system.
Needs to avoid external library dependencies, or particular system specifics.
Preferably needs to avoid being too Perl version specific.
Preferably needs to avoid being a maintenance headache itself.
With a pony too, if possible. :-)

Nicholas Clark

PS Ilmari, lunch!