# Lawn: an Unbound Low Latency Timer Data Structure for Large Scale, High Throughput Systems

## TL;DR

Lawn introduces a low latency, unbound range timer data structure based on the Timing Wheel algorithm, optimized for large-scale, high-throughput real-time systems, with minimal overhead and no performance degradation.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel unbound timer data structure that simplifies implementation and improves performance over existing algorithms for real-time applications.

## Key findings

- Minimal overhead in timer management
- No overflow or performance degradation
- Effective in large-scale, high-throughput environments

## Abstract

As demand for Real-Time applications rises among the general public, the importance of enabling large-scale, unbound algorithms to solve conventional problems with low to no latency is critical for product viability. Timer algorithms are prevalent in the core mechanisms behind operating systems, network protocol implementation, stream processing, and several database capabilities. This paper presents a field-tested algorithm for low latency, unbound range timer structure, based upon the well excepted Timing Wheel algorithm. Using a set of queues hashed by TTL, the algorithm allows for a simpler implementation, minimal overhead no overflow and no performance degradation in comparison to the current state of the algorithms under typical use cases.