Java Microbenchmarking

Working late on preparing a performance test tomorrow, I stumbled over something called microbenchmarking. The idea is to put small performance tests within you code to evalute the system. This gives you the liberty of extracting performance measurements regardless of what environment the platform runs in (i.e. your development desktop vs. testing vs. production).

There are an awful lot of obvious (and perhaps not so obvious) things not to do while microbenchmarking. Consider e.g. if you should invoke any large or small load, what layer to stress, when to do this ..

I'm implementing this as a JBoss MBean, which will let me invoke a test suite with a HTTP request, and get a "ping"-style timer response.

I'll post my results later if this happens to be an interesting feature.