Benchmarking
When we talk about benchmarking our code, we are talking about measuring how quickly it can perform one complete operation. For instance, take the web crawler that we built in the last chapter--if we benchmarked this program, we would typically measure the number of pages we could index per second.
When doing performance optimizations, we take a starting benchmark that represents the current state of our program as a whole, and then use a combination of micro benchmarking and profiling in order to optimize these programs and achieve higher throughput.
Micro benchmarking is, essentially, decomposing our application into a series of steps, and then, benchmarking each of these steps individually in order to determine the bottlenecks within our code. We break, what is essentially a hard problem to optimize as a whole, into a series of smaller problems that become easier to optimize and tune.
Source: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/breaking-down-problems-is-the-number-1-software-developer...
