In a recent post to the Ning Code blog David Sklar shares a framework for microbenchmarking to can use to squeeze that last bit of performance out out of your application.

The goal is to make it as easy as possible to compare the runtime of alternative approaches to the same problem, such as different regular expressions, or different methods for string or array manipulation.The source distribution contains a README with some documentation and a bunch of sample benchmarks.

You won't notice too much of a change for most updates to your application except in specific situations (like things that go through a large number of loops). You can grab the latest version from its github account.