latency: All content tagged as latency in NoSQL databases and polyglot persistence
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
When More Machines Equals Worse Results
Galileo observed how things broke if they were naively scaled up.
Google found the larger the scale the greater the impact of latency variability. When a request is implemented by work done in parallel, as is common with today’s service oriented systems, the overall response time is dominated by the long tail distribution of the parallel operations. Every response must have a consistent and low latency or the overall operation response time will be tragically slow.
Fantastic post from Todd Hoff on the (hopefully) well known truth: “the reponse time in a distributed parallel systems is the time of the slowest component“.
Original title and link: When More Machines Equals Worse Results (©myNoSQL)
Monday, 19 March 2012
Visualizing System Latency
Besides the many practical lessons emphasized in Jack Clark’s interview with Adrian Cockcroft on ZDNet—luckly I’ve had the chance to see some of Cockcroft’s presentations about Netflix architecture and also talk to him directly—one thing that sticked with me was the ending paragraph:
The thing I’ve been publicly asking for has been better IO in the cloud. Obviously I want SSDs in there. We’ve been asking cloud vendors to do that for a while. With Cassandra, we’ve had to go onto horizontal scale and use the internal disks and triple replicate across availability zones, so you end up with a triple-redundant data store that is careful not to overload the disks.
That reminded me of this old ACM article authored by Brendan Gregg:
When I/O latency is presented as a visual heat map, some intriguing and beautiful patterns can emerge. These patterns provide insight into how a system is actually performing and what kinds of latency end-user applications experience. Many characteristics seen in these patterns are still not understood, but so far their analysis is revealing systemic behaviors that were previously unknown.
I was wondering if in the NoSQL databases space (and data storage space in general) are there any of the monitoring tools that provide such advanced visualization of latency data. Do you know any?
Original title and link: Visualizing System Latency (©myNoSQL)
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Google Research: Let's Make TCP Faster
Google is actively researching ways to improve TCP:
Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We’re experimenting with several improvements to TCP. Here’s a summary of some of our recommendations to make TCP faster:
- Increase TCP initial congestion window to 10 (IW10). The amount of data sent at the beginning of a TCP connection is currently 3 packets, implying 3 round trips (RTT) to deliver a tiny 15KB-sized content.
- Reduce the initial timeout from 3 seconds to 1 second.
- Use TCP Fast Open (TFO).
- Use Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP (PRR).
The database world attacked the network latency with connection pools and pipelining. For reducing network round trips we’ve used JOINs or denormalized data. But all software architectures will benefit from a faster TCP.
Original title and link: Google Research: Let’s Make TCP Faster (©myNoSQL)
via: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2012/01/lets-make-tcp-faster.html
