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Showing posts from June, 2013

Easy to add but hard to remove

In rapid development projects, how easy and interesting it is to add new functionality is key.  In this environment, exciting, new, terser languages are more productive. It helps to keep developers motivated and happier which leads to more code. In low latency environment, adding code is not the hard problem.  Understanding the problem, the behaviour of the system, and what you program is really doing is the hard program. This leads to removing code, layers and complexity are more important and harder to achieve. To remove something you gain from static analysis, a minimum of side effects and clear relationships.  You also benefit from a clear understanding of what the code is really doing all the way down to the CPU level.  Without this you cannot remove things which don't need to be done and your code will be needlessly slower. A simple example is the amount of garbage you are producing. One way to slow down a program is to produce lots of garbage.  T...

High resolution timings without the custom hardware

Overview There is a a wide range of vendors who support PTP and packet capture time-stamping with micro-second timestamps or better.  This works well in large complex organisations where changing the software to do this is not an easy option, any you need something which stands back and tries to make sense of it all.  The biggest problem with this approach is that your analysis of the data is typically twice the effort of just capturing the data, if you are lucky and use standard protocols which are already supported. As software developers is there as easy, simple, cheap way to get high resolution timings without the hardware complexity.  Can we also find a simple way to ensure the data we capture will be used? Bottom Up approach Using hardware is a very bottom up approach.  You have to Distribute accurate timing using something like PTP. (requires special hardware) You have to add timestamps to the packets (more special hardware) You have to record all...