[tex-live] strange discrepancy in running time of etex between TL2015 and TL2017

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

One other point to note when comparing times of small benchmarks is
that modern processors, especially in laptops and compute servers,
monitor their workload, and decrease clock frequency when they don't
have much to do.  The reason is that energy consumption is
proportional to (clock frequency)**x, where x is usually some number
between 2 and 3.

Thus, for a benchmark that takes only a few seconds, you need to run
it multiple times in a row to keep the CPU busy: after a while
(usually a few minutes), the times will likely become reasonably
stable, if nothing else is happening on the system.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------