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This is an excellent slideshow.

The slide on measuring by having a fake server replaying order data, a second server calculating runtimes, the server under test, and a hardware switch to let you measure packet times is so delightfully hardcore.

I don't have any interest in working in finance, but it must be fun working on something so performance critical that buying a rack of hardware just for benchmarking is economically feasible.




Delightfully hardcore indeed!

But of course you don't have to buy a rack of servers for testing, you can rent it. Servers are a quickly depreciating asset, why invest in them?


Why would replaying data for testing be "Delightfully hardcore indeed!". That's how people program in general, they run the same data through their program.

Servers are a quickly depreciating asset, why invest in them?

I don't think they are a quickly depreciating asset compared to the price of renting, but you would want total control over them in this scenario anyway.


I thought that the hardcore part is taking the data from the switch to account for the network latency.


> Why would replaying data for testing be "Delightfully hardcore indeed!".

Replaying data isn't hardcore. Buying a dedicated server and running it through a dedicated switch just to gather precise timing info is.


You'd want it to be the exact same hardware as in production, for one.


The self driving space does this :)




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