---
title: Cursed Meals
order: 9
description: Performance hexes, haunted benchmarks, and other kitchen nightmares - debugging war stories from the fennecs den.
---

# Cursed Meals

*Every kitchen has that one shelf, way in the back, with the jar nobody bothered to label. This is ours - war stories and examples of things that can go surprisingly wrong.*

## NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION

These are **BAD EXAMPLES** and their back stories. Learn from our mistakes, but don't repeat them.

### [Microcode](Microcode.md) and Subnormal numbers

A routine benchmark that got 3× slower, but only when it ran more than 12000 iterations. A ghost story about very, very small numbers.

![a zombified fennec eating a cardboard pizza box](/img/fennec-zombie.png)