Y'know, sometimes The Job just fucking wears on you.
Ok, so I have one cow-orker who is not the sharped knife in the drawer. We are running a system that needs certain portions of the data encrypted, so he was tasked with writing an encrypting filter. He does this, and is testing it on our data stream.
Performance results show that the time from our sender pushing the records into the system to his filter reading them increasing. Our test reader is showing a time delta of nearly nothing, and it just reads. And we have another process that is reading and storing records from the stream, and it backs up pretty steadily as the DB load increases
So the obvious conclusion is that his reader is backing up because of the processor load.
But no, that's not what he thinks. He is adamant that there might be another reason.
Why the fuck am I having to explain to a nominally experienced programmer that if the passthru does not show delayy and the proessor-loaded filter shows delay, ,it's due to processor load?
