Yes, you have to be very careful with measurements, I agree.
> If you speed things up by 10% on your server, they'll get 10% faster on your laptop as well.
Depends on the speedup and techniques to achieve it. For example, speeding things up via more parallelism can lead to wall-clock improvements on servers but not laptops, precisely because the latter just end up doing more thermal throttling....
Ideally, you want to measure both ideal hardware and actual-user-hardware; often speedups on one will not be visible on the other and vice versa.
> If you speed things up by 10% on your server, they'll get 10% faster on your laptop as well.
Depends on the speedup and techniques to achieve it. For example, speeding things up via more parallelism can lead to wall-clock improvements on servers but not laptops, precisely because the latter just end up doing more thermal throttling....
Ideally, you want to measure both ideal hardware and actual-user-hardware; often speedups on one will not be visible on the other and vice versa.