Empirical Measures

From

Empirical analysis of a program is a factual enquiry carried out by simply recording what is observed or measured from actual run-time behavior of a program. Two of the more common empirical measures of program behavior are actual clock time and operations counting. Examples of operations counting: counting comparisons; counting assignments (memory writes); counting the number of times the inner most code in a loop is executed.

Asymtotic measures are "analytical" meaning that we look at the algorithm and deduce it's behavior. Empirical measures are situational observations; we measure real behavior for a specific situation. They are complimentary to each other; empirical measures should validate our analytical view of program behavior.