Owned.

From: Ted Dunning [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2012 4:13 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: HADOOP in Production


On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Hank Cohen 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
There is an important difference between real time and real fast

Real time means that system response must meet a fixed schedule.
Real fast just means sooner is better.

Good thought, but real-time can also include a fixed schedule and a specified 
list of exceptional conditions which would prevent meeting the schedule.

It may also include a fixed schedule that must be met some fraction of the time 
(usually very near 100% of the time).

Without providing exceptions, you basically force the designer to lie about how 
reliable their system is.

Real time systems always have hard schedules. The schedule could be in 
microseconds to control a laser for making masks for semiconductor 
manufacturing, milliseconds to control the ignition in your car or flight 
controls on an F-22 or  seconds for even slower moving processes.  In real time 
system missing the schedule can mean that very bad things happen: planes fall 
from the sky, your laser printer fries it's imaging drum, factories explode etc.

It can mean that.  But if you specify the exceptional situations you can 
specifically mitigate for them.

Most transaction processing is happy with real fast
The folks doing high velocity trading are pretty close to real time but they 
probably will be happy with real fast.
If real fast systems miss a schedule then someone loses money.

Yeah.  And if you talk to these guys, they know the difference and ask for 
real-time.


The reason that RTOS type operating systems are popular for real time 
applications is that they don't allow operations to spend indeterminate amounts 
of time in uninterruptable states.  Java will never qualify as a real time 
system because it has garbage collection and garbage collection can lock up a 
system for an indefinite amount of time while it goes through marking and 
counting.

You are behind the times on a few counts.

- Java's collectors don't "count".

- Java can be real-time:

http://rtjava.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/real-time-java-vms.html

- Garbage collection can be deterministic and real-time:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-rtj4/index.html
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E13221_01/wlrt/docs30/intro_wlrt/tuning.html

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