Devlog #1: Writing fake traffic generator

TL;DR: Wrote a fake event generator for normal events, still need to do it for DNS and connections. Had trouble with time.sleep()

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Goal for this session

Write a bigger part of fake event generator

What I did

• Wrote helper functions for queueing, making states of processes and making packets from states
• Wrote a function that using them all adds packets to queue
• Implemented the burst functionality into it

Problems I hit

The output was not smooth. During 5 seconds it was sometimes generating much less packets than expected. It was because time.sleep(0.01) is not exactly 0.01s but at least 0.01s.

Fix:

measure the real time since the last iteration dt and scale by it, so the packet count follows real time, not loop speed. The fractional part is handled with a random coin flip, since I can’t send 0.033 of a packet:

expected = state["rate"] * mult * dt 
n = int(expected)
if random.random() < (expected - n):
    n = n + 1
for _ in range(n):
    put(q, make_packet(name, prof, state))

What I learned

• That time.sleep can’t be trusted
• What threading is
• What queues are

Next up

• Add DNS and connection events to this

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