Benchmark and system parameters often have a significant impact on performance evaluation, which raises a long-lasting question about which settings we should use. This paper studies the feasibility and benefits of extensive evaluation. A full extensive evaluation, which tests all possible settings, is usually too expensive. This work investigates whether it is possible to sample a subset of the settings and, upon them, generate observations that match those from a full extensive evaluation. Towards this goal, we have explored the incremental sampling approach, which starts by measuring a small subset of random settings, builds a prediction model on these samples using the popular ANOVA approach, adds more samples if the model is not accurate enough, and terminates otherwise. To summarize our findings: 1) Enhancing a research prototype to support extensive evaluation mostly involves changing hard-coded configurations, which does not take much effort. 2) Some systems are highly predictable, which means that they can achieve accurate predictions with a low sampling rate, but some systems are less predictable. 3) We have not found a method that can consistently outperform random sampling + ANOVA. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to improve artifact predictability and strategies for selecting parameter values during evaluation.

To allow performance comparison across different systems, our community has developed multiple benchmarks, such as TPC-C and YCSB, which are widely used. However, despite such effort, interpreting and comparing performance numbers is still a challenging task, because one can tune benchmark parameters, system features, and hardware settings, which can lead to very different system behaviors. Such tuning creates a long-standing question of whether the conclusion of a work can hold under different settings. This work tries to shed light on this question by reproducing 11 works evaluated under TPC-C and YCSB, measuring their performance under a wider range of settings, and investigating the reasons for the change of performance numbers. By doing so, this paper tries to motivate the discussion about whether and how we should address this problem. While this paper does not give a complete solution---this is beyond the scope of a single paper, it proposes concrete suggestions we can take to improve the state of the art.