I think the 8 second limit is probably arbitrary. Lambda’s normal limit is 5
minutes. I presume Amazon did some UX work, and basically asked “what’s the
maximum length of time your average user is willing to wait for an answer
before they consider it a bad experience”, and came up with 8 seconds. You’re
not allowed to change that value, so they obviously take it seriously!
While testing the skill I developed, I certainly found that the turnaround time
when I had to perform a full remote data fetch was about 5 seconds. That’s
long enough after asking Alexa the question that I start to think “is it going
to reply? is it working?” and that’s not a good experience, so my approach to
that has been:
(a) cache the data fetched; the data is stored in session attributes, and
persisted to S3. That cached copy provides a response which is within a second
or two, a much nicer experience.
(b) when fetching fresh data, there’s a progressive response API which you can
call asynchronously, while the slower task takes place. Now, that 5 second
wait doesn’t feel so bad, because you’re listening to “Please wait while I ask
for the latest data” while the real work goes on in the background. Silence in
a conversation feels really uncomfortable really quickly, as we all know.
Sorry, this is nothing to do with HPC or Beowulf, although kind of interesting
from a UX perspective on voice-controlled systems.
Tim
On 25 Nov 2020, at 15:33, Lux, Jim (US 7140)
<james.p....@jpl.nasa.gov<mailto:james.p....@jpl.nasa.gov>> wrote:
Interesting..
Where does the 8 second limit come from? (Rodeos and bull/bronc riding, where
you only have to stay on for 8 seconds?) I’ve seen this 8 second thing in a
bunch of places lately, and I wonder.. why not 7, or 10 or whatever? I find it
hard to believe that someone has a 3 bit counter in seconds (or worse, it’s a
33 bit counter counting nanoseconds or some such, and the limit is actually
8.589 seconds)
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