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Flotilla
- #51 11 min
Benchmarking Message Queue Latency
About a year and a half ago, I published Dissecting Message Queues, which broke down a few different messaging systems and did some performance benchmarking. It was a naive attempt and had a lot of problems, but it was also my first time doing any kind of system benchmarking. It turns out benchmarking systems correctly is actually pretty difficult and many folks get it wrong. I don’t claim to have gotten it right, but over the past year and a half I’ve learned a lot, tried to build some better tools, and improve my methodology.
- #30 6 min
Benchmark Responsibly
When I posted my Dissecting Message Queues article last summer, it understandably caused some controversy. I received both praise and scathing comments, emails asking why I didn’t benchmark X and pull requests to bump the numbers of Y. To be honest, that analysis was more of a brain dump from my own test driving of various message queues than any sort of authoritative or scientific study—it was far from the latter, to say the least. The qualitative discussion was pretty innocuous, but the benchmarks and supporting code were the target of a lot of (valid) criticism. In retrospect, it was probably irresponsible to publish them, but I was young and naive back then; now I’m just mostly naive.