Benchmarks and the information they provide are important to ensure that changes going into Node.js don't regress key attributes like startup speed, memory footprint and throughput. Come and hear about some of the fundamentals of benchmarking, how to go about narrowing down the cause of a regression between versions of node along with the efforts underway in the community benchmarking workgroup (https://github.com/nodejs/benchmarking) to run/capture/report and act on benchmark information. About Michael Dawson Michael Dawson is an active contributor to Node.js as a CTC member, the facilitator for the benchmarking working group, participant in the lts, build, api and port-mortem working groups and has contributed many of the changes to enable support for Linux on Power, LinuxOne and AIX. He leads the Node.js team within IBM’s runtime technologies team driving IBM’s Node.js runtime deliveries and the runtime team’s contribution to Node.js and v8 within the Node and google communities. He’s been working in the industry for over 25 years with the last 11 focused on building runtimes including Node.js and Java. Further back, he held leadership roles in teams that developed e-commerce applications and delivered them as services, including EDI communication services, credit card processing and electronic invoicing.