4 ms·

If your Win27k startup is a 8k 120fps video of a butterfly transforming to a windows logo - then it is latency Btw all bandwith is built to reduce latency, are

• eqvinox 2y ago
  No, neither of these are true. If Win27k startup is an 8k 120fps video, it is either latency or stutter if you don't have enough bandwidth. You can absolutely design a system with priorities set such that latency is above stutter-/drop-free playback, and if you do, the startup time will be unaffected by that bandwidth. And, no, not all bandwidth is built to reduce latency. There is a lot of bulk, best-effort traffic - for example, YouTube and Netflix proactively distributing videos between datacenters across the world. (They totally do that before anyone ever clicks play, they have enough data to know what is likely to be needed where.) The same applies to your YouTube/Netflix playback at home. It doesn't need to be low latency. The only effect of latency is a longer time between you clicking play and playback actually starting. From there onwards, you just need enough bandwidth to keep the buffer filled, and you can do that quite a bit ahead of reaching playback position. Latency is a real non-issue there. Same locally for bulk copying files around. If your OS & FS is designed well, latency only shows up at the beginning of the operation. Most file systems were designed when data was on rotating rust, and that's dealt with readahead and the likes.
• retrac 2y ago
  Latency and bandwidth are often in tension. (And guaranteeing low latency can eat up a big chunk of theoretically available bandwidth, due to overhead.) The canonical example is probably a dial-up modem or other slow link between two locations. The latency is under 1 second to send one byte over the modem. But it's probably faster to just ship a hard disk if you want to send 100 gigabytes from one location to the other, even though the latency might be hours or even days, until the first byte arrives. In practice, you can send lots of tiny little packets with lots of overhead (but low latency) or you can send lots of big heavily buffered packets with low overhead (but with high latency). This is why multiplayer game protocols often consist of a constant stream of tiny UDP packets containing events like "character moved 40 nits east at game time ..." or "character fired weapon at game time ...." Even a 10 kilobyte bulk state update is going to cost at least a few milliseconds, more probably tens or even hundreds of milliseconds over some wireless connection. And that's a very noticeable lag.
  • Dylan16807 2y ago
    Another good example is the memory in your computer. DDR is much lower latency, and GDDR is much higher bandwidth.