Corvil » Corvil Insight

There are many approaches to, and techniques for, managing the performance of high-end applications, but the foundation they all must be built on is precise instrumentation. In the realm of low-latency applications, such as high-performance trading, the foundation is precision timing: without knowing exactly when specific events occur, you can’t begin to measure, analyse and manage latency. The timestamping mechanism used determines how precisely events can be timed - however it turns out to be as important, if not more important, to understand the quality of the clock being used.

Before you act, check the following…

Before consuming measured timestamps and latencies, we recommend that you get answers to the following questions:

• Are the timestamps generated in hardware or software?
• What is the quality of the clock from which the timestamps are read? By how much does it drift and wander with respect to a true clock?
• If the latency is measured using timestamps from two different clocks, how closely are the two clocks synchronized? If they are not synchronized, how well are the differences between them modelled?

Corvil have developed innovative mathematical technologies, and have selected best-of-breed hardware components, to create a solution that delivers precise and practical answers to the above set of questions:

• By selecting a high-performance hardware-timestamping NIC (network interface card) in an appliance platform, we can ensure high-fidelity capture and timing of all messages and events of interest.
• By developing a sophisticated model of the clocks in those NICs, we can ensure that drift and wander on those cards do not compromise the precision of CorvilNet latency measurements.
• Our clock modelling technology also allows us to deliver high-precision latency measurements across distributed environments even without any external hardware support.

To understand the issues around precision timing in greater detail please read the following Corvil white paper entitled: “Clock Synchronization – The Jitters and Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Precision Time”
Request a copy of this white paper.