Problems with simple time measurement in scala - scala

I try to "profile" an expensive method by the means of just printing the system time. I've written a small method that prints the current time in seconds relative to the start-time. :
object Bechmark extends App {
var starttime = 0L
def printTime(): Unit = {
if (starttime == 0L) {
starttime = System.currentTimeMillis()
}
println((System.currentTimeMillis() - starttime) / 1000.0)
}
printTime()
Thread.sleep(100)
printTime()
}
I expect therefore that the first call to printTime prints something close to 0. But the output I get is
0.117
0.221
I don't understand why the first call already gives me ~120 miliseconds? What is the correct implementation for my purpose?

As others have mentioned the running time of your application does not necessarily represent the actual world time elapsed. There are several factors that affect it: warm up time of the JVM, JVM garbage collection, steady state of the JVM for the accurate measurement, OS process dispatching and shuffling.
For Scala-related purposes I suggest ScalaMeter
that allows you to tune all the aforementioned variables and measure the time quite accurately.

Related

How to scale random simulations with parallelism in Swift?

I'm playing around in Swift 5.1 (on the Mac) running little simulations of tennis matches. Naturally part of the simulation is randomly choosing who wins each point.
Below is the relevant part of the code where I do the parallelism.
func combine(result: MatchTally)
{
overallTally.add(result: result)
}
DispatchQueue.concurrentPerform(iterations: cycleCount){iterationNumber in
var counter = MatchTally()
for _ in 1...numberOfSimulations
{
let result = playMatch(between: playerOne, and: playerTwo)
counter[result.0, result.1] += 1
}
combiningQueue.sync {combine(result: counter)}
}
With an appropriate simulation run count chosen, a single queue takes about 5s. If I set the concurrent queues to 2, the simulation now takes 3.8s per queue (i.e. it took 7.2s). Doubling again to 4 queues results in 4.8s / queue. And finally with 6 queues (the machine is a 6 core Intel i7) things take 5.6s / queue.
For those who need more convincing that this relates to random number generating (I'm using Double.random(0...1)) I replaced the code where most of the random outcomes are generated with a fixed result (I couldn't replace the second place as I still needed a tie-break) and adjusted the number of simulations appropriately, the outcomes were as follows:
1 queue: 5s / queue
2 queues: 2.7s / queue
4 queues: 1.9s / queue
6 queues: 1.7s / queue
So as you can see, it appears that the randomness part is resistant to running in parallel.
I've also tried with drand48() and encountered the same issues. Anybody know whether this is just the way things are?
Xcode 11.3,
Swift 5.1,
macOS 10.15.3,
Mac mini 2018,
6 core i7 (but have encountered the same thing over the years on different hardware)
For anyone interested in reproducing this themselves, here is some code I created and Alexander added to.
import Foundation
func formatTime(_ date: Date) -> String
{
let df = DateFormatter()
df.dateFormat = "h:mm:ss.SSS"
return df.string(from: date)
}
func something(_ iteration: Int)
{
var tally = 0.0
let startTime = Date()
print("Start #\(iteration) - \(formatTime(startTime))")
for _ in 1...1_000_000
{
tally += Double.random(in: 0...100)
// tally += 3.5
}
let endTime = Date()
print("End #\(iteration) - \(formatTime(endTime)) - elapsed: \(endTime.timeIntervalSince(startTime))")
}
print("Single task performed on main thread")
something(0) // Used to get a baseline for single run
print("\nMultiple tasks performed concurrently")
DispatchQueue.concurrentPerform(iterations: 5, execute: something)
Swapping out the random additive in the loop for a fixed one demonstrates how well the code scales in one scenario, but not the other.
Looks like the solution is to use a less 'fashionable' generator such as drand48(). I believed I had already testing that option, but seems that I was wrong. It seems this doesn't suffer from the same issue so I guess it is inherent to arc4random() which I believe Double.random() is based upon.
The other positive is that it is about 4 times faster to return a value. So my simulations won't be cryptographically secure, but then what tennis match is? 🤭

Suitable wall clock time threshold for when a method should be used async?

I believe this question to be programming language agnostic, but for reference, I am most interested in Swift.
When we perform a Pythagoras calculation inside a method, we know that for 32 or 64 bit Int this will be a fast operation.
func calculatePythagoras(sideX x: Int, sideY y: Int) -> Int {
return sqrt(x*x+y*y)
}
We can call this method syncronously since we consider it to be fast enough.
Of course, it would be silly - assuming Int of max 64-bit size - to implement this in an asynchronous manner:
func calculatePythagorasAsync(sideX x: Int, sideY y: Int, done: (Int) -> Void) -> Void {
DispatchQueue.global(qos: .userInitiated).async {
let sideZ = sqrt(x*x+y*y)
DispatchQueue.main.async {
done(sideZ)
}
}
}
This is just overcomplicating the code since we can assume that disregarding of how old and slow the device we are running on, performing two multiplications and one square root of integers of max size 64 this will execute fast enough.
This is what I am interested in, what is fast enough?. Let's say that for the sake of simplicity we constrain this discussion to one specific device D. Let's say that the execute (wall clock time) for calculating Pythagoras on device D is 1 microsecond.
What do you think is a reasonable threshold for a method M should be changed to asynchronous? Imagine we would like to call this method M every time we display a table view (list view) cell (item), calling M on the main thread. And we would like to keep a smooth 60 fps when scrolling. 1 microsecond is surely fast enough. Of course, 100,000 microseconds (= 0.1 seconds) is not nearly fast enough. Probably 10,000 microseconds (= 0.01 s) is not fast enough either.
Is 1,000 microseconds (= 1 millisecond = 0.001 s) fast enough?
I hope you do not think this is a silly question, I am genuinely interested.
Is there any reference to some standard regarding this? Some best practice?

Q: [Anylogic] Measuring production throughput rate

I would like to know how to measure the throughput rate of the production line on Anylogic.
Question: Are there any methods to measure the Time Between Departure of the agent at the sink block? >>(I will calculate the throughput rate by inverting the time between departure value.)
At the moment, I just simply calculated the throughput based on Little's law, which I use the average lead time and WIP level of the line. I am not sure that whether the throughput value based on this calculation will be equal to the inverted value of the time between departure or not?
I hope you guys could help me figure it out.
Thanks in advance!
There is a function "time()" that returns the current model time in model time units. Using this function, you may know the times when agent A and agent B left the system, and calculate the difference between these times. You can do this by writing the code like below in the "On exit" field of the "sink" block:
statistic.add(time() - TimeOfPreviousAgent);
TimeOfPreviousAgent = time();
"TimeOfPreviousAgent" is a variable of "double" type;
"statistic" is a "Statistic" element used to collect the measurements
This approach of measuring time in the process flow is described in the tutorial Bank Office.
As an alternative, you can store leaving time of each agent into a collection. Then, you will need to iterate over the samples stored in the collection to find the difference between each pair of samples.
Not sure if this will help but it stems off Tatiana's answer. In the agents state chart you can create variables TimeIn, TimeOut, and TimeInSystem. Then at the Statechart Entry Point have,
TimeIn = time();
And at the Final state have,
TimeOut = time();
TimeInSystem = TimeOut - TimeIn;
To observe these times for each individual agent you can use the following code,
System.out.println("I came in at " + TimeIn + " and exited at " TimeOut + " and spent " + TimeInSystem + " seconds in the system";
Then for statistical analysis you can calculate the min, avg, and max throughputs of all agents by creating in Main variables, TotalTime, TotalAgentsServiced, AvgServiceTime, MaxServiceTime, MinServiceTime and then add a function call it say TrackAvgTimeInSystem ... within the function add argument NextAgent with type double. In the function body have,
TotalTime += NextAgent;
TotalAgentsServiced += 1;
AverageServiceTime = TotalTime/TotalCarsServiced;
if(MinServiceTimeReported == 0)
{
MinServiceTime = NextAgent;
}
else if(NextAgent < MinServiceTime)
{
MinServiceTime = NextAgent;
}
if(NextAgent > MaxServiceTime)
{
MaxServiceTime = NextAgent;
}
Then within your agent's state charts, in the Final State call the function
get_Main().TrackAvgTimeInSystem(TimeInSystem);
This then calculates the min, max, and average throughput of all agents.

What is the difference between Apache Spark compute and slice?

I trying to make unit test on DStream.
I put data in my stream with a mutable queue ssc.queueStream(red)
I set the ManualClock to 0
Start my streaming context.
Advance my ManualClock to batchDuration milis
When i'm doing a
stream.slice(Time(0), Time(clock.getTimeMillis())).map(_.collect().toList)
I got a result.
when I do
for (time <- 0L to stream.slideDuration.milliseconds + 10) {
println("time "+ time + " " +stream.compute(Time(time)).map(_.collect().toList))
}
None of them contain a result event the stream.compute(Time(clock.getTimeMillis()))
So what is the difference between this two functions without considerings the parameters differences?
Compute will return an RDD only if the provided time is a correct time in a sliding window i.e it's the zero time + a multiple of the slide duration.
Slice will align both the from and to times to slide duration and compute for each of them.
In slide you provide time interval and from time interval as long as it is valid we generate Seq[Time]
def to(that: Time, interval: Duration): Seq[Time] = {
(this.milliseconds) to (that.milliseconds) by (interval.milliseconds) map (new Time(_))
}
and then we "compute" for each instance of Seq[Time]
alignedFromTime.to(alignedToTime, slideDuration).flatMap { time =>
if (time >= zeroTime) getOrCompute(time) else None
}
as oppose to compute we only compute for the instance of Time that we pass the compute method...

In Rx (or RxJava/RxScala), how to make an auto-resetting stateful latch map/filter for measuring in-stream elapsed time to touch a barrier?

Apologies if the question is poorly phrased, I'll do my best.
If I have a sequence of values with times as an Observable[(U,T)] where U is a value and T is a time-like type (or anything difference-able I suppose), how could I write an operator which is an auto-reset one-touch barrier, which is silent when abs(u_n - u_reset) < barrier, but spits out t_n - t_reset if the barrier is touched, at which point it also resets u_reset = u_n.
That is to say, the first value this operator receives becomes the baseline, and it emits nothing. Henceforth it monitors the values of the stream, and as soon as one of them is beyond the baseline value (above or below), it emits the elapsed time (measured by the timestamps of the events), and resets the baseline. These times then will be processed to form a high-frequency estimate of the volatility.
For reference, I am trying to write a volatility estimator outlined in http://www.amazon.com/Volatility-Trading-CD-ROM-Wiley/dp/0470181990 , where rather than measuring the standard deviation (deviations at regular homogeneous times), you repeatedly measure the time taken to breach a barrier for some fixed barrier amount.
Specifically, could this be written using existing operators? I'm a bit stuck on how the state would be reset, though maybe I need to make two nested operators, one which is one-shot and another which keeps creating that one-shot... I know it could be done by writing one by hand, but then I need to write my own publisher etc etc.
Thanks!
I don't fully understand the algorithm and your variables in the example, but you can use flatMap with some heap-state and return empty() or just() as needed:
int[] var1 = { 0 };
source.flatMap(v -> {
var1[0] += v;
if ((var1[0] & 1) == 0) {
return Observable.just(v);
}
return Observable.empty();
});
If you need a per-sequence state because of multiple consumers, you can defer the whole thing:
Observable.defer(() -> {
int[] var1 = { 0 };
return source.flatMap(v -> {
var1[0] += v;
if ((var1[0] & 1) == 0) {
return Observable.just(v);
}
return Observable.empty();
});
}).subscribe(...);