benchmarking

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The measurement of something's performance judged against an established benchmark or reference standard.

   Their annual benchmarking revealed that delivery times lagged behind the industry leaders.

   Engineers rely on benchmarking to track how each new processor performs.

   Note

   The word belongs to the laboratory as much as to the office. Victor Greiff and colleagues in 2015 pair technological benchmarking with normalization of immune sequencing as groundwork for cross-laboratory comparison. It is countable when separate exercises are meant (benchmarkings). Tell it from the verb's -ing form by what follows: the noun takes of (the benchmarking of servers), the gerund a direct object (benchmarking the servers).

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of benchmark.

   We are benchmarking our customer service against the best in the field.

   Benchmarking the servers revealed major differences in speed.

   Note

   Two different verbs share this -ing form, and the construction tells them apart. Used transitively, usually with against, it means measuring something by a standard (benchmarking our service against the best). Used intransitively, it reports how a thing scores in a test, typically with an adverb of result (the chip is benchmarking well).

   The new processor is benchmarking well ahead of last year's model.

   Early prototypes were benchmarking poorly on memory-heavy tasks.

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