Why is clock_gettime so erratic?

Question

Intro

• Section Old Question contains the initial question (Further Investigation and Conclusion have been added since).

Answer 1

When you have a highly skewed distribution that cannot go negative, you're going to see large discrepancies between mean, median, and mode. The standard deviation is fairly meaningless for such a distribution.

It's usually a good idea to log-transform it. That will make it "more normal".