Tudor Brindus
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- Jane Street27 min
System Jitter and Where to Find It: A Whack-a-Mole Experience
A technical analysis of a simulated low-latency message passing system in OCaml demonstrates that moving from a virtualized environment to bare metal hardware reduces median round-trip latency from 637 nanoseconds to 223 nanoseconds. By sequentially isolating network interrupts with `isolcpus`, disabling timer ticks via `nohz_full`, locking CPU frequencies, and optimizing speculative execution, researchers achieved a final stable median latency of 163 nanoseconds with near-zero jitter. The study concludes that while aggressive overclocking offers marginal speed gains, it introduces unacceptable risks of memory corruption, establishing deterministic bare metal configurations as the necessary standard for reliable high-frequency trading infrastructure.