[mosh-devel] carpal tunnel, measuring latency, and how to disable prediction testing

[Keith Winstein]

Frederick:

Thanks for your kind words about Mosh. For instant predictions (that might
be wrong and get corrected by the server), please try the
--predict=experimental option to mosh.

You can measure the latency with our term-save tool:
https://github.com/keithw/stm-data/

Best regards,
Keith

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 12:13 AM, Frederik Eaton <frederik at ofb.net> wrote:

> Dear Mosh Developers,
>
> Thank you for a great product. I have thought about the need for
> something like this for years, and was happy when I discovered 'mosh'
> (a bit late I know).
>
> Your mailing list is not indexed by Google, but I downloaded the
> archives and found there seems to be no mention of 'carpal tunnel
> syndrome' or 'tendonitis'. I wanted to say that the reason I think a
> product like mosh is so valuable, is that according to my own self
> observation, typing over high-latency connections causes tendonitis. I
> wonder that no one else has made this connection, perhaps it is my own
> imagination. (I guess the hypothetical mechanism would be that my
> brain sends a "work faster" signal whenever a nerve seems to be
> working slowly, according to the delayed visual feedback, causing some
> kind of damage to healthy nerves)
>
> In any case, whether for health or "minimum annoyance" reasons, I have
> an interest in eliminating latency as much as possible. I don't care
> if someone sees part of all of my password, or if control sequences
> briefly show up on my editor screen. What I want is for immediate
> visual confirmation when one of my fingers pressed a key. The man page
> says "The predictive model must prove itself anew on each row of the
> terminal and after each control character, so mosh avoids echoing
> passwords or non-echoing editor commands." Is there an easy way to
> turn this feature off in the source code? Is it a bad idea, for some
> reason I haven't anticipated?
>
> My other (related) question is how to measure the actual latency. I
> can imagine that someone may have patched xterm to log input and
> output characters with sufficiently fine-grained timestamps, so that
> the latency of ssh, mosh, screen, etc. could be calculated, as the
> user presses random keys. I saw a couple things on your github issue
> tracker which look like people are measuring these values. I'm curious
> how to measure them myself. My initial trial of mosh (on an Arch
> Linux, 800 MHz "Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270" (32-bit)) seems to show a
> slightly higher latency than simply typing on a local editor, and I'm
> curious to know if this is real.
>
> Thank you again for your dedication and incredibly useful software
> contribution, and also for reading my questions.
>
> Please Cc on replies as I'm not subscribed. Thanks,
>
> Frederick Eaton
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>
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