[Bloat] Terminology for Laypeople

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 16 May, 2021, at 11:44 pm, Michael Richardson <mcr at sandelman.ca> wrote:
> 
> Your analogy is definitely the result of optimizing for batches rather than latency.

I really don't know how you got there from here.  What I described is basically a pipeline process, not batch processing.  The delay is caused by the fact that the product already in the pipeline has already been bought by the hardware store, and thus contractually the loggers can't divert it to an individual customer like me.

You can think of one bag of firewood as representing a packet of data.  I've requested a particular number of such bags to fill my trailer.  Until my trailer is full, my request is not satisfied.  The hardware store is just taking whatever manufacturing capacity is available; their warehouse is *huge*.

We can explore the analogy further by changing some of the conditions:

1: If the felling of trees was the bottleneck of the operation, such that the trimming, chopping and bagging could all keep up with it, then the delay to me would be much less because I wouldn't have to wait for various backlogs (of complete trees, branches, and piles of firewood) belonging to the hardware store to be dealt with first.  Processing each tree doesn't take very long, there's just an awful lot of them in this patch of forest.

1a: If the foreman told the felling team to take a tea break when a backlog built up, that would have nearly the same effect.  That's what an AQM does.

2: If the hardware store wasn't involved at all, the bags of firewood would be waiting, ready to be sold.  I'd be done in the time it took to load the bags into my trailer.

3: If the loggers sold the *output* of the process to the hardware store, rather than having them reserve it at the head of the pipeline, then I might only have to wait for the throughput of of the operation to produce what I needed, and load it directly into my trailer.  *That* would be just-in-time manufacturing.

 - Jonathan Morton