referencework

A fixed piece of work, and a speed budget that holds under any load.

Detailed description

The kernel is kiln's host-score work (kiln-file §KN-K15c): text formatting, a regular expression, a JSON document written and read, compression and a hash, mostly inside Qt's library. kiln times it to score a host. A suite times it beside its own work, so that a speed budget is a ratio that load, CPU clock and host cancel out of (§KN-K15c, the ratio form).

A wall-clock budget failed under load with no change to the code: the 1 MiB HTML case of testOpalWebFetch took 225 ms at a load of 37 on y8's 64 threads and 307 to 321 ms at a load of 70 to 78 (2026-10-12). The machine was slower, not the code. The ratio of the work's CPU time to the CPU time of the same kernel, on the same thread at the same moment, leaves out the waits for a CPU and keeps a lower clock on both sides, so it does not move: 8.03 to 8.62 for that case, calm and under 128 busy processes.

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