hyperfine

A benchmarking tool for shell commands that does the statistics properly: warmup runs, multiple samples and outlier detection.

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About hyperfine

Timing a command with `time` once tells you very little. hyperfine runs it repeatedly, reports mean and standard deviation, and flags statistical outliers caused by other programs or caching effects interfering with the measurement.

It handles the details that make benchmarks honest: warmup runs before measuring, cache-clearing commands between runs, and parameterised benchmarks where you sweep a value such as thread count. Pass several commands and it compares them directly. Results export to CSV, JSON, Markdown and AsciiDoc.

Strengths

  • Statistical analysis across multiple runs with outlier detection
  • Warmup runs and cache-clearing preparation commands for honest disk benchmarks
  • Compares several commands in one invocation
  • Exports results to CSV, JSON, Markdown and AsciiDoc

Limitations

  • Measures whole-process wall time, so it cannot profile inside a program
  • Very fast commands are dominated by process startup overhead
  • The last release is from 2025 and the repository has been quiet since
  • Results still depend on a quiet machine, which it can detect but not create

Details

Pricing
Free · Free and open source, dual licensed Apache 2.0 or MIT.
License
Apache-2.0
Developer
sharkdp
Platforms
Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
How it runs
Downloadable app
Account
Not required
Works offline
Yes
Best suited for
Proving whether one command is actually faster than another
Categories
Command line tools
Last verified
Added
Provenance
Selected from the TechWalrus downloads catalog (Utilities); facts checked against the developer's own pages, 2 sources on file.

Report a wrong fact or a dead link on this listing