Visualizing Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

http://blog.nahurst.com/visualizing-latency-numbers-every-programmer

by nathanh • 14 years ago

41 6 14 years ago

blog.nahurst.com

jstultz• 14 years ago

Visualizing these numbers is a good idea, but this is a terrible execution.

- The line segments go in different directions, making it unnecessarily difficult to visually determine relative lengths

- The packet send from CA to the Netherlands and back to CA is split over many lines, making it even more difficult

- The data is split across multiple maps, making it nearly impossible to get a good sense of, say, just how much longer the packet roundtrip takes than a memory reference.

- It's nearly impossible to see the line segment for main memory reference

- Having the lines overlaid on a map is more distracting than anything else

rpearl• 14 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 is a far better way to visualize latency.

kghose• 14 years ago

That was an awesome lecture. Thanks for the link. I did not know Hopper was such a humorous lecturer. The audience wasn't so lively - I guess they were mostly military.

tarice• 14 years ago

Rule of thumb for human-perceived "instantaneous" interactivity: 100,000,000 ns (100 ms) [1]

A good metric to compare those numbers against.

[1]http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/LatencyQuest.html

agscala• 14 years ago

I thought that the whole point of converting these latency numbers was to convert them into something meaningful. Distance traveled by the speed of light is just as abstract as the original number itself.

xunop• 14 years ago

This seems better to me https://gist.github.com/2843375

Visualizing Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

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