I am trying to get an interval function, pre-programmed on separate devices, to sync up with each other. So several mobile devices all running the same interval function in sync. At first I thought I could just use the devices internal clocks and start the functions on the 0 of the minute. I realize now that mobile clocks aren't really all that accurate and are not synced to each other. Now I need a new solution.
I'm using heroku, node.js, socket.io, and ionic if that helps at all.
Conceptually, you could do the following:
Have each client establish a time reference vs. a common server.
Send a color changing message to each client with a specific timestamp a short time in the future when the color changing effect is to be started.
When each client receives the color changing message, it looks at the scheduled timestamp a short time in the future, corrects for the time reference and schedules the event vs. its own clock.
When that time arrives at each client, each client starts playing the event.
This will be as accurate as the time reference you establish in step 1 and that's where the tricky portion is and where the accuracy of lack of accuracy is established. There's a description of one method for doing that in this post: Measuring time difference between networked devices.
Once you establish the time delta between the client clock and the reference clock, you store that delta locally and you can apply that delta to any future time directives from the server. So, if you receive a directive to carry out some operation at 12:30:05.00, but your client clock has been measured to be +12.33 seconds fast from the server reference, then you would subtract that +12.33 seconds from the scheduled time and set a timer that would fire at 12:29:52.67 on your local clock.
You handle the fact that the transit time to each client may not be the same by sending a directive for a specific time in the future. You can pick any time in the future, but it must not be a longer time into the future than the longest transit time to any client. You can also measure that from each client and report it to the server or if you have enough time to schedule in advance, you can just send the message with the directive at least several seconds ahead of time (longer than any transit time is likely to be in normal operating conditions).
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I need to make POST http request at exact timestamp in future, as accurate as possible, down to milliseconds. But there is network latency as well. How can I achieve such a goal?
setTimeout is not enough here, because it always takes some time resulting in latecomer request due vary network latency. And firing this request before target timestamp may result in early coming request.
My goal is to make request guaranteed came to server after target timestamp, but as soon as possible after it. Could you suggest any solutions with Nodejs?
The best you can do in nodejs (which is not a real-time system) is to do the following:
Premeasure the expected latency so you know about how much to presend the request.
Use setTimeout() to schedule the send at precisely the one-way latency time before your target time. There is no other mechanism in nodejs that would be more precise.
If your request involves a DNS lookup, you can prefetch the TCP address for your hostname and take the DNS lookup time out of your request cycle or at least prime the local DNS cache.
Create a dedicated nodejs program that does nothing else - so its event loop will not be doing anything else at the time the setTimeout() needs to run. You could run this as a child_process from your larger program if desired.
Run a number of tests to see how the timing works and, if you are consistently off by some margin, then adjust your latency offset.
You can develop a regular latency test to determine if the latency changes with time.
As others have said, there is no way to predict what the natural response time will be of the target server (how long it takes to start processing your request from the moment your network packets arrive there). If lots of incoming requests are all racing for the same time slot, then your request will get interleaved in among all the others and served in some order that you do not control.
Other things you can consider. If the target server supports the latest http specifications, then you can have a pre-established http connection with the host (perhaps targeting some other endpoint) that will be kept alive for you to send your precise timing request on. This would take some experimentation to figure out what the target host supports and if this would work.
I am doing a project where I need to send device parameters to the server. I will be using Rasberry Pi for that and flask framework.
1. I want to know is there any limitation of HTTPS POST requests per second. Also, I will be using PythonAnywhere for server-side and their SQL database.
Initially, my objective was to send data over the HTTPS channel when the device is in sleep mode. But when the device (ex: car) wakes up I wanted to upgrade the HTTPS to WebSocket and transmit data in realtime. Later came to know PythonAnywhere doesn't support WebSocket.
Apart from answering the first question, can anyone put some light on the second part? I can just increase the number of HTTPS requests when the device is awake (ex: 1 per 60 min in sleep mode and 6 per 60sec when awake), but it will be unnecessary data consumption over the wake period for transmission of the overhead. It will be a consistent channel during the wake period.
PythonAnywhere developer here: from the server side, if you're running on our platform, there's no hard limit on the number of requests you can handle beyond the amount of time your Flask server takes to process each request. In a free account you would have one worker process handling all of the requests, each one in turn, so if it takes (say) 0.2 seconds to handle a request, your theoretical maximum throughput would be five requests a second. A paid "Hacker" plan would have two worker processes, and they would both be handling requests, to that would get you up to ten a second. And you could customize a paid plan and get more worker processes to increase that.
I don't know whether there would be any limits on the RPi side; perhaps someone else will be able to help with that.
I am serving my users with data fetched from an external API. Now, I don't know when this API will have new data, how would be the best approach to do that using Node, for example?
I have tried setInterval's and node-schedule to do that and got it working, but isn't it expensive for the CPU? For example, over a day I would hit this endpoint to check for new data every minute, but it could have new data every five minutes or more.
The thing is, this external API isn't ran by me. Would the only way to check for updates hitting it every minute? Is there any module that can do that in Node or any approach that fits better?
Use case 1 : Call a weather API for every city of the country and just save data to my db when it is going to rain in a given city.
Use case 2 : Send notification to the user when a given Philips Hue lamp is turned on at the time it is turned on without having to hit the endpoint to check if it is on or not.
I appreciate the time to discuss this.
If this external API has no means of notifying you when there's new data, then the only thing you can do is to "poll" it to check for new data.
You will have to decide what an "efficient design" for polling is in your specific application and given the type of data and the needs of the client (what is an acceptable latency for new data).
You also need to be sure that your service is not violating any terms of service with your polling scheme or running afoul of rate limiting that may deny you access to the server if you use it "too much".
Would the only way to check for updates hitting it every minute?
Unless the API offers some notification feature, there is no other scheme other than polling at some interval. Polling every minute is fairly quick. Do your clients really need information that is less than a minute old? Or would it really make no difference if the information was as much as 5 minutes old.
For example, in your example of weather, a client wouldn't really need temperature updates more often than probably every 10-15 minutes.
Is there any module that can do that in Node or any approach that fits better?
No. Not really. You'll probably just use some sort of timer (either repeated setTimeout() or setInterval() in a node.js app to repeatedly carry out your API operations.
Use case: Call a weather API for every city of the country and just save data to my db when it is going to rain in a given city.
Trying to pre-save every possible piece of data from an external API is probably a losing proposition. You're essentially trying to "scrape" all the data from the external API. That is likely against the terms of service and will likely also run afoul of rate limits. And, it's just not very practical.
Instead, you will probably want to fetch data upon demand (when a client requests data for Phoenix, then, and only then, do you start collecting data for Phoenix) and then once a demand for a certain type of data (temperatures in a particular city) is established, then you might want to pre-cache that data more regularly so you can notify clients of changes. If, after awhile, no clients are asking for data from Phoenix, you stop requesting updates for Phoenix any more until a client establishes demand again.
I have tried setInterval's and node-schedule to do that and got it working, but isn't it expensive for the CPU? For example, over a day I would hit this endpoint to check for new data every minute, but it could have new data every five minutes or more.
Making a remote network request is not a CPU intensive operation, even if you're doing it every minute. node.js uses non-blocking networking so most of the time during a network request, node.js isn't doing anything and isn't using the CPU at all. The only time the CPU would be briefly used is when you first send the API request and then when you receive back the result from the API call and need to process it.
Whether you really need to "poll" every minute depends upon the data and the needs of the client. I'd ask yourself if your app will work just fine if you check for new data every 5 minutes.
The method I would use to update would be contained outside of the code in a scheduled batch/powershell/bash file. In windows you can schedule tasks based upon time of day or duration since last run, so what you could do is run a simple command that will kill your application for five minutes, run npm update, and then restart your application before closing the shell.
That way you're staying out of your API and keeping code to a minimum, and if your code is inside that Node package in the update, it'll be there and ready once you make serious application changes or you need to take the server down for maintenance and updates to the low-level code.
This is a light-weight solution for you and it's a method I've used once or twice at my workplace. There are lots of options out there, and if this isn't what you're looking for I can keep looking out for you.
The getstream.io documentation says that one should expect retrieving a feed in approximately 60ms. When I retrieve my feeds they contain a field named 'duration' which I take is the calculated server side processing time. This value is steadily around 10-40ms, with an average around 15ms.
The problem is, I seldomly get my feeds in less than 150ms and the average time is rather around 200-250ms and sometimes up to 300-400ms. This is the time for the getting the feed alone, no enrichment etc., and I have verified with tcpdump that the network roundtrip is low (around 25ms), and that the time is actually spent waiting for the server to respond.
I've tried to move around my application (eu-west and eu-central) but that doesn't seem to affect things much (again, network roundtrip is steadily around 25ms).
My question is - should I really expect 60ms and continue investigating, or is 200-400ms normal? On the getstream.io site it is explained that developer accounts receive "Low Priority Processing" - what does this mean in practise? How much difference could I expect with another plan?
I'm using the node js low level API.
Stream APIs use SSL to encrypt traffic. Unfortunately SSL introduces additional network I/O. Usually you need to pay for the increased latency only once because Stream HTTP APIs supports HTTP persistent connection (aka keep-alive).
Here's a Wireshark screenshot of the TCP traffic of 2 sequential API requests with keep alive disabled client side:
The 4 lines in red highlight that the TCP connection is getting closed each time. Another interesting thing is that the handshaking takes almost 100ms and it's done twice (the first bunch of lines).
After some investigation, it turns out that the library used to make API requests to Stream's APIs (request) does not have keep-alive enabled by default. Such change will be part of the library soon and is available on a development branch.
Here's a screenshot of the same two requests with keep-alive enabled (using the code from that branch):
This time there is not connection reset anymore and the second HTTP request does not do SSL handshaking.
I'm using REST GET calls from a google script to build a temperature profile of my house during the day. The function triggers every 15min. last_connection (and the rest of the data) will sometimes be the same 3-4 calls in a row, other times can be different each time for several hours running, suggesting variable rates at which the thermostat sends data up to the server.
Does anyone know what governs the thermostat's connections to nest.com or if there is a way to force a connection in order to get an up to date profile?
The thermostat connects to Nest's cloud under the following circumstances:
A 'significant' even has occurred (ie the furnace turning on)
A timeout has occurred (ie a scheduled check in appointment)
A thermostat will be considered offline if it misses its check in window, there is more detail on why that would happen in Nest's Troubleshooting Offline Status in the Nest apps support article.
You can force a thermostat to come online by sending a change to it, for example changing the target temperature will necessarily force the thermostat to wake up so the new value can be set, while awake the thermostat will update the cloud service with updated information. Forcing a thermostat to wake as way to get updated data from the thermostat is not recommended as you will run into an API rate limit designed to protect the battery on the thermostat. Charging rates on thermostats are rather limited, wake it too often and it will go offline for a while, annoying the user.
Rest assured, if the ambient temperature or humidity changes by a 'significant' amount, the thermostat will wake up and update the cloud service. The thresholds of what signifies a significant amount are harder to predict as they are partially determined by charging rate. If you want to know why that can vary, Nest has filed a patent which goes into great detail.