One of my goals at Acmebenchmarking is make sure I'm running on hardware that is representative of real-world infrastructure, while at the same time doing it as inexpensively as possible.

To date I've been running on two custom built "desktops" (for lack of a better term). Both have an Intel Core i7 4790K processor (quad core plus hyperthreading, 4Ghz), 32GB RAM (dual channel), and a quality SSD. They are named acmebench01 and acmebench02.

Alas, it is time to expand. MUST...PURCHASE...MORE...HARDWARE!

In order to maintain the inexpensive theme I tend to buy used hardware, my goal on this purchase was to achieve many more cores and greater memory bandwidth than my existing machines can provide. Keep in mind that used hardware is great for benchmarking (and likely development and QA environments) but you might want to avoid it for production. For years now I've been purchasing used hardware …

Technical conferences are flooded with visual [mis]representations of a particular product's performance, compression, cost effectiveness, micro-transactions per flux-capacitor, or whatever two-axis comparison someone dreams up. Lets be honest, benchmarketers like to believe we all suffer from innumeracy.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines innumeracy as follows:
innumeracy (noun): marked by an ignorance of mathematics and the scientific approach Mark Callaghan has been a long time advocate of explaining benchmark results, but that's not the point of the bar chart. Oh no, the bar chart only exists to catch your eye and …