Did work go down, producing the same outputs? Make sure wall clock time stayed the same or dropped. Same means we may not be taking advantage of the gains yet, but it’s going in the right direction. Some perf work needs refactoring first.
The /goal was basically “make performance better.”
This worked because I thoroughly instrumented my program with counters of work done, attributable to various phases of work.
This and wall clock time means it could properly evaluate suggested refactorings