Presentation: "How not to measure latency"

Time: Wednesday 13:30 - 14:20

Location: Regency

Abstract:

Understanding application responsiveness and latency is critical to delivering good application behavior. But good characterization of bad data is useless. When measurements of response time present false or misleading latency information, even the best analysis can lead to wrong operational decisions and poor application experience.

In this talk, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) will discuss some common pitfalls encountered in measuring and characterizing latency. Gil will demonstrate and discuss some false assumptions and measurement techniques that lead to incorrect results, and cover simple ways to sanity check and correct these situations. He will discuss the fallacy of using standard deviation measurements, the strongly multi-modal nature of latency, common discontinuities found in most computing platforms, and how back pressure and coordinated data omission issues can skew measurement results dramatically. Gill will introduce and demonstrate how simple and recently open sourced tooling can be used to improve and gain higher confidence in both latency measurement and reporting.

 

Gil Tene, CTO and Co-founder, Azul Systems

 Gil  Tene

Gil Tene is CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems. He has been involved with virtual machine technologies for the past 20 years and has been building Java technology-based products since 1995. Gil pioneered Azul's Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4), Java Virtualization, Elastic Memory, and various managed runtime and systems stack technologies that combine to deliver the industry's most scalable and robust Java platforms.

In 2006 he was named one of the Top 50 Agenda Setters in the technology industry by Silicon.com. Prior to co-founding Azul, Gil held key technology positions at Nortel Networks, Shasta Networks and at Check Point Software Technologies, where he delivered several industry-leading traffic management solutions including the industry's first Firewall-1 based security appliance. He architected operating systems for Stratus Computer, clustering solutions at Qualix/Legato, and served as an officer in the Israeli Navy Computer R and D unit. Gil holds a BSEE from The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and has been awarded 27 patents in computer-related technologies.  

Twitter: @giltene