'Why is my running time graph have outliers?

I implemented 3 algorithms, merge sort, insertion sort, and fast multiply. They all work correctly, I made extensive unit tests to confirm that. Now I am testing their running time over a large set of inputs of various sizes, but my graphs have outliers. What could be the causes?

The things I considered:

  • My shuffling algorithm (move everything over by one. Then randomly swap 2 elements n times, where n = size of the array. This ensures very few elements remain in the same place and there is a decent amount of variation in each iteration)
  • Random hardware stuff/ chance (would like a better explanation)

merge sort running time , fast multiply running time

I am refraining from posting the code since these are assignments and I do not want to get flagged for plagiarism.

pythonalgorithmperformancetime-complexity


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