This algorithm is used in Yammer Metrics to keep running statistics on whatever quantities you want to track. For instance, you could time a particular section

This algorithm is used in Yammer Metrics to keep running statistics on whatever quantities you want to track. For instance, you could time a particular section of code, and it will tell you the average time, the standard deviation, the 99th percentile time, and so on. It's tremendously useful, and the algorithm from that paper makes it also very cheap. https://github.com/codahale/metrics/ https://github.com/codahale/metrics/