In this note, we investigate the performance of optimal double circulant even codes which are not self-dual, as measured by the decoding error probability in bounded distance decoding. To do this, we classify the optimal double circulant even codes that are not self-dual which have the smallest weight distribution for lengths up to $72$. We also give some restrictions on the weight enumerators of (extremal) self-dual $[54,27,10]$ codes with shadows of minimum weight $3$. Finally, we consider the performance of extremal self-dual codes of lengths $88$ and $112$.