Benchmarking Function

[David Wheeler <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fellow PostgreSQLers,

With a bit of guidance from Klint Gore, Neil Conway, Josh Berkus, and  
Alexey Dvoychenkov, I have written a PL/pgSQL function to help me  
compare the performance between different functions that execute the  
same task. I've blogged the about the function here:

  http://www.justatheory.com/computers/databases/postgresql/ 
benchmarking_functions.html

My question for the list is: How important is it that I have the  
control in there? In the version I've blogged, the control just  
executes 'SELECT TRUE  FROM generate_series( 1, n)' and iterates  
loops over the results. But I wasn't sure how accurate that was.  
Another approach I've tried it to simply loop without executing a  
query, 'FOR i IN 1..n LOOP', but that takes virtually no time at all.

The idea of the control is, of course, to subtract the overhead of  
the benchmarking function from the code actually being tested. So I  
guess my question is, how important is it to have the control there,  
and, if it is important, how should it actually work?

Many TIA,

David