Comment by hliyan
7 hours ago
Used to do this sort of thing for computations that needed to run in the 10 microsecond range (HFT stuff), circa 2008. Had very predictable results because:
a) language was not garbage collected (C++)
b) we avoided heap lock contentions in critical paths by pre-allocating object pools at startup
c) I/O operations were offloaded to separate threads, connected by mutex locked linked lists
d) processing thread was bound to its own CPU core
That's about as deterministic as we could get.
Did all of those trying to reduce the jitter. I think it was about the CPU clock not being stable.
Additionally I avoided core 0, because it was the noisiest and did some cgroups core pinning for the test workload.
There were zero page faults during the test runs and the CPU core was uncontested by other threads.
I think in 2008 CPUs were not so crazy about power and heat management.