The Jitter Tax: Benchmarking AWS Nitro vs. Bare Metal

[!WARNING] Standard cloud monitoring tools average metrics over 1 minute. They are lying to you. In High-Frequency Trading (HFT), you live or die in the microsecond tails.

The Micro-Burst Problem

Most funds lose 10-15% of alpha to "Micro-bursts" of latency that standard monitoring tools (CloudWatch) average out and miss. When a market moves, everyone moves. The network stack gets flooded.

The Physics of Copying

In a standard Linux network stack, a packet travels:

1. NIC -> Kernel Ring Buffer
2. Kernel -> Copy to Socket Buffer
3. Socket -> Copy to User Space

This "double copy" consumes CPU cycles and pollutes the L1/L2 cache.

Our Solution: Zero Copy (DPDK)

By utilizing the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), we bypass the kernel entirely.

• Latency: Reduced from ~15µs to <2µs.
• Jitter: Deterministic execution.

Download our Benchmarking Tool (Rust CLI) to test your own stack.