Caught by The Law!

Don’t get too excited. Those of you hoping to see me carted off in manacles and an orange jumpsuit will be sadly disappointed…

No, the law to which I refer is Moore’s Law, which states effectively, if you need reminding, that computing power doubles roughly every eighteen months.

Recently I’ve been doing some work to model a system in which two sub-systems collaborate by exchanging a very large number of relatively fine-grained web services. (I know, I wouldn’t have designed it that way…) The two partners disagree about how the system will scale, so it fell to me to do some modelling of the behaviour. I decided to back my analysis up with a practical simulation.

Working in my preferred environment (VB.Net) it didn’t take long to knock up a web service simulating the server, and a client which could load it up with either synchronous or asynchronous calls on various threading and bundling models. To make the simulation more realistic I decided that the service should wait, with the processing thread under load, for a given period before returning, to simulate the back-end processing which will occur in reality. The implementation should be simple: note the time when the service starts processing, set up the return structures and data required by my simulation, check the time, and then if necessary sit in a continuous loop until the desired total time has elapsed.

It didn’t work! I couldn’t get the system to recognise the time taken by the internal processing I had done, which threw out the logic for the loop. Effectively the system was telling me this was taking zero time. The problem turned out to be that I had assumed all processing times should be measured in ms. 5ms is our estimate of the average internal processing time. 6ms is our estimate of the round trip time for the web services. It seemed reasonable to allow a few ms for the processing in my simulation. Wrong!

It turns out that VB.Net now measures time in Ticks, which are units of 100ns, or one tenth of a microsecond. So I rewrote the timing logic to use this timing granularity, but still couldn’t quite believe the results. My internal processing was completing in approximately 1 Tick, or roughly 10,000 times faster than I expected.

Part of this is down to the fact that my simulation doesn’t require access to external resources, such as a database, which the real system does. But much of the difference is down to Moore’s Law. The last time I did something similar was around 10 years ago, and my current laptop must at least 100 times faster.

The moral of the story: beware your assumptions – they may need a refresh!