Testing application results against the main performance aspects such as resource usage, latency, throughput, availability, scalability and efficiency is definitely the way any performance engineering fulfills its goals by comparing such results to the desired performance levels.

As developers, we need a numerical expression of all performance aspects to infer if something is working incorrectly, or simply if some optimization may improve a performance aspect. Never consider simply aggregated values. Always go deep in the performance analysis of any software. This is the key to success to developing a performing application.

Profiling is the technique used to analyze at runtime how our software behaves regarding resource usage (CPU or memory consumption), with details aggregated per routine/function. This means that a profiling engine will explicitly inform you which routine is consuming the most CPU time in our application, which is a huge help in bottleneck identification...