Typically in low-latency development, a trade-off must be made between minimizing latency and avoiding excessive CPU utilization. This article explores how Chronicle’s Pausers — an open-source product — can be used to automatically apply a back-off strategy when there is no data to be processed, providing balance between resource usage and responsive, low-latency, low-jitter applications.

Description of the Problem

In a typical application stack, multiple threads are used for servicing events, processing data, pipelining, and so on. An important design consideration is how threads become aware that there is work to do, with some general approaches including: