Is stopwatch benchmarking acceptable?

Question

Does anyone ever use stopwatch benchmarking, or should a performance tool always be used? Are there any good free tools available for Java? What tools do you use?

Answer 1

Stopwatch is actually the best benchmark!

The real end to end user response time is the time that actually matters.

It is not always possible to obtain this time using the available tools, for instance most testing tools do not include the time it takes for a browser to render a page so an overcomplex page with badly written css will show sub second response times to the testing tools, but, 5 seconds plus response time to the user.

The tools are great for automated testing, and for problem determinittion but dont lose sight of what you really want to measure.