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Amazing writing, very accessible too.

So batching requests is always something I think should increase performance by a lot, but most server implementations make this pretty difficult, but the thing I struggle the most to understand is how to keep the latency down if you have multiple clients request all batched together? The total amount of latency for all clients is always the latency for the slowest.

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If you give the TigerBeetle client a single transfer, it sends it off immediately to the cluster. There's no delay. No Nagle!

But if your application then creates another transfer against the client, and another, while the first request is inflight, then the client will autobatch under the hood and send these off as a batch when the first request returns.

You get this sweetspot then between latency and throughput. And your latency is not spiking as your load increases, since your throughput is now able to keep up.

I think you design in layers, frontends that work as clients to TigerBeetle for work in batches (as mentioned by the sibling comment), but the whole idea of removing latency differences by removing unpredictability means that you don't get the jitter of latency differences that can cause backing up in normal scenarios.

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