Finding root cause of latencies

A common issue in real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulations is latency in components that run on separate computers. These latencies can significantly degrade system performance. To differentiate between delays in component operations and network latency, you can send timestamps along with the data, log the time at reception, and record both timestamps:

Since components A and B have different clocks, you cannot directly compare the send and receive times. However, you can calculate the differences separately. If diff(timeSend) == diff(timeReceive), the latencies are likely not due to network congestion or a faulty switch/NIC but rather to delays in the operation of component A. It is highly unlikely for time differences to be the same if there is a problem with the network, it could only happen if the network was always adding a constant delay for each packet transmission.

Of course, you should perform the file saving in a separate thread to prevent blocking other operations. To minimize disk access, write to the log file periodically, for example, by flushing the log buffer to the file once per second.