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For performance evaluations, using minimum, maximum or average response times is a bad idea: “The ‘average’ is the evil of performance optimization and often as helpful as ‘average patient temperature in the hospital’”. Instead, performance tuners should be looking at the percentile: “A percentile is the value of a variable below which a certain percent of observations fall”. In this blog post, I present an efficient implementation suitable for tracking percentiles for live data - perfectly suited for response times of web applications and other servers. (Java code included)