The Bug Was in My Benchmark: Attaching a Debugger to Chromium Throttles fetch() Uploads 20x

A team encountered a performance issue with file uploads in their Coffer file store, which was attributed to a benchmarking issue. The real problem was that the upload process was not overlapping encryption and transfer, causing a bottleneck. The solution was to pipeline the encryption and transfer, allowing them to run concurrently. This resulted in a 13% improvement in upload time. However, further analysis revealed that the improvement was due to the benchmarking process itself, not the actual code change. The team learned to be cautious when attributing performance improvements to code changes and to measure performance more accurately.