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Measures the agent trace encoder in isolation: a pre-built trace is encoded many times through a null writer so only the encoder cost is measured. The fixture (trace-fixture.js) mirrors a typical Node.js HTTP-service request (~30 spans: an Express root, middleware, Postgres/Redis/HTTP-client/DNS spans, one error span) with reused keys and hot values to match the encoder's string cache. tickTrace rewrites the per-request dynamic fields before each encode so V8 does not collapse the magnitude branches and stale-cache hits the encoder must exercise. TRACE_SPANS=<n> scales the trace; variants 0.4/0.5 cover the wire formats and the *-events-* variants the span-event paths.