feat(bench): split each cell into startup and work against a floor fixture#173
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This was referenced Jul 15, 2026
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Closes #172. 1/3 — the consumer side is FerrLabs/FerrFlow (floor fixture + shard wiring) and the chart is FerrLabs/FerrFlow-Cloud.
Every bar is one number today, so "the tool is slow" and "Node is slow to start" are indistinguishable. For the JS tools startup is most of the bar, and on the two cells where FerrFlow looks slower it is the whole story.
Each cell now also carries
startup_msandwork_ms, derived from afloorfixture — one package, one commit since the last tag — benchmarked with each tool’s normal command. That median is the tool’s fixed cost of being invoked at all: process spawn, runtime boot, module loading, config resolution.Why not
--version. It is the obvious floor and it is wrong: it skips the lazyrequires the real command pulls in, so it undercounts startup and bills the difference as the tool’s work. Measured at ~286 ms forcommit-and-tag-version— and the error flatters us, which is exactly why it can’t ship. The floor runs the real command instead.median_msstays the headline, untouched. Startup is real time the user waits. The split explains where it goes; it doesn’t get to redefine the score. That’s the same rule as--jobs 1vsferrflow_paralleland cold vsferrflow_cached.Shape.
flooris just another fixture, so no new hyperfine plumbing.derive-work.shsubtracts, drops the floor cells frombenchmarks(an instrument, not a data point — the site would otherwise renderflooras a fixture), and writes the two fields into each cell. Because they live inside the cell,merge-results.shneeds no change and each shard subtracts the floor measured on its own runner — which matters, since shards land on different machines. The floor is excluded from theferrflow_parallelandferrflow_cachedstats; those are about big repos.Backward compatible: no
floordirectory infixtures-dirmeans no derivation and an unchangedlatest.json, so the current FerrFlow pin keeps working until it moves.Worked example on real cold numbers from run 29416210326:
mono-largeferrflowmono-largechangesetsmono-largecommit-and-tag-versionIt reads honestly in both directions: we beat
commit-and-tag-versionon work alone, not just on startup — and 71% of the changesets bar it "wins" with is Node booting.Tests. 9 bats, covering the subtraction, the clamp at zero, floor removal, per-tool/method/command matching, a missing floor, no floor at all, and metadata survival. The per-tool matching test caught a real jq scoping bug — in
$k | endswith("-" + .)the.binds to$k, not to theselectelement, so every cell silently matched the wrong floor or none. Without that test it would have shipped green.