Measuring BPF performance: Tips, tricks, and best practices

Measuring stuff is harder than you may think. Even in math, there is such a thing as non-measurable sets and Banach-Tarski paradox, which shows that a three-dimensional ball of radius 1 can be dissected into 5 parts, which can be magically reassembled to form two balls of radius 1. Now imagine what kind of mess we've got in software engineering. This may sound somewhat philosophical, so let's get down to earth and talk about BPF programs. BPF, which originally stood for Berkeley Packet Filter, i...