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Axes should (almost) always be zero-based
Ideas from Diego
- I was too scared to edit your wiki page, John, so I'm putting my ideas here. Please integrate them (or not) as you see fit. I'm sure this is worth writing, even if no PC would accept it.
When your graph is so obvious to you that you wonder whether others will find it boring, you're just about done.
Don't just look at averages. Also look at distributions, and check individual samples to make sure there's not a pattern (in RAMCloud, Alex and Mendel found that every other RPC was slower).
Script your entire experiment and graph end-to-end.
Generate your graphs incrementally, so you can see what the entire graph will look like while you're still gathering data. Fill the graph in like a progressively-rendered image, then repeat each data point to add error bars.
Record more data than you plot, so that when you decide you want to graph something else, you may not need to re-run the experiment.