[zeromq-dev] Big Latencies

[Aja Walker]

Pieter Hintjens <ph <at> imatix.com> writes:

> Bad latencies are usually due to contention over CPU. Windows
> typically is much worse at this than Linux. Check what's running, try
> killing anything that looks greedy. And you also need to make sure
> your box has enough cores, which is one per 0MQ thread plus one per
> 0MQ context (for the i/o thread).

Okay, that would certainly explain it.  The Windows 7 machine has 4
cores, although two of those are from hyperthreading, so really we'll
just say 2 cores.  When I have one pinger thread and one echo thread
and zero I/O threads (by using inproc transport) the percentage of
messages with big latencies drops to about 1 in 1000, which seems
pretty reasonable.  As I increase the number of threads it gets worse,
as would be expected from your explanation.

Still, one thing seems odd.  In the minimal setup I just described,
999/1000 messages have a round-trip latency of a few tens of
microseconds.  But that 1 message out of 1000 with the big latency
will be almost exactly 10 milliseconds without variation.  Why am I
not seeing latencies across a whole range?  Why does it jump all the
way up to exactly 10 milliseconds?  Is that just an artifact of 
Windows' thread scheduling?  Should I not worry about it so much?