return from Claude:
The bench measures nothing reliable at this scale. afterMs=13.21 vs beforeMs=12.56 is ~650ns
per lookup for both paths; at that granularity a single GC pause or scheduler hiccup easily
swamps the actual gain, and the "after" path happens to run first (cold caches), so it gets
penalised on unlucky runs. Your local station happens to warm up before the noise lands; CI
shared-runners often don't.
Fix: run each path a few times and take the minimum (min is noise-proof — noise only slows
things down, never speeds them up):
Edouard Vanbelle
ef7143da43