We were about to ship a performance write-up claiming three queries had gotten 2-4x slower. All three numbers were wrong, and the reason is one every benchmark author should worry about: the same binary, on the same machine, running the same query, gave different answers depending on what time of day we ran it.

The measurement that didn't add up

While checking a change to Samyama Graph, we timed LDBC SNB Interactive query IC9 on one commit, one dataset, one 16-core workstation, four hours apart:

when

commit