41–47 of 47 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple weeks ago someone brought up High Frequency Trading and while in theory it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, I’ve been chewing on the thesis of the linked article ever since: that the real trick to doing things quickly is to do them consistently. That variance causes far more kinds of practical problems than does average response time.
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
- Print and online "Communications of the ACM" magazine
- Safari Books subscription included - all 40,000 books (!)
- Online courses, webinars, special interest group conferences
- Full ACM Digital Library (only with the all-access membership option - $198)
[1] https://services.acm.org/public/qj/keep_inventing/qjprofm_co...
note: the promo code in the URL came on a Google search, and seems to give a 25% discount for first year (which is higher than on the site directly). I have no affiliation with ACM other than being a happy subscriber
My pick is Jeff Dean's The Tail At Scale (2013) [1]. If you're interested in performance of web services, it's very, very well-written and describes a counterintuitive (but crucial!) phenomenon: your p99.99 latency can drive the entire user experience because of head-of-line blocking. As microservice architectures have gotten more popular, this has only become more important. It's a fiendishly difficult problem to ge…
An argument I’ve had a few times and wish I didn’t: Yes, this situation only happens a small fraction of the time, but it happens exactly once to each user, and the first time they use it. It doesn’t matter what the stats say. The facts are that every user will see this problem and it will be their first experience with the feature .
This was an issue that came around the time I was starting my dive into agents after reading [1] and it showed me my particular interest is a small part of what other people label the area.
1) https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.123...
This is a good opportunity to remind folks that an ACM subscription is very affordable ($99/year; 25% off on first year [1]), and the benefits are more than worth it: - Print and online "Communications of the ACM" magazine - Safari Books subscription included - all 40,000 books (!) - Online courses, webinars, special interest group conferences - Full ACM Digital Library (only with the all-access membership option - $…