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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!
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<div class="">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:</div>
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<div class="">(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.</div>
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<div class="">(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.</div>
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<div class="">Sorry, this is nothing to do with HPC or Beowulf, although kind of interesting from a UX perspective on voice-controlled systems.</div>
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<div class="">Tim</div>
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<div class="">On 25 Nov 2020, at 15:33, Lux, Jim (US 7140) <<a href="mailto:james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov" class="">james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov</a>> wrote:</div>
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Interesting..<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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<o:p class=""> </o:p></div>
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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)<o:p class=""></o:p></div>
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