Hi all,
That does seem indeed funny. Both your explanations could make sense, depending on your code and if you're using caches, it could also be that you get cache misses, for instance if you have an infinite while loop and for some reason at some code path, some lines get evicted. I can't really know for sure without having a look at the system.
For the context of this lab, you don't need to look much further into this issue, however make sure that you take many measurements and average them together. Outliers are sure to happen, especially if you're using caches.
If you were designing a system that is long-running and in which timings are hard constraints, you would of course need to make sure whether this glitch is due to measurement error, or from the system itself.
Best,
The TAs team
