So... there were actually several contributors to this
long latency. Some of it was related to GNU Radio's inner workings,
some were external. With all of the "external" things removed, there was still 1+ minute of latency at low bitrates.
I thought I would share my findings, for the sake of getting this experience publicly archived. (and maybe someone can build on these insights?)
First,
a little background on the application. The use case-here is that
there is some moderately complex that isn't data-specific per-se. But
the quality of the demodulated data is evaluated on a periodic basis to
determine alignment through multiple, parallel FEC decoding chains. After alignment is detected, an appropriate chain is selected, and downstream delays are adjusted. Here are specific things that were observed:
- We gave up on the stock selector block early on. It was misaligning samples, which effected a down-stream interleaving process. What are the general thoughts/feelings on how the selector block is currently implmeneted.
- We tried several "clever" (ha) methods to select the desired stream. Most of them revolved around the concept of summering/xoring streams after multiplying or and'ing the streams according to which stream we wanted (operand = 1 if we wanted the stream, 0 if not). Through various methods we found that anything with a constant source, and const, etc, create this very long latencies. The behavior was this:
After the streams were selected and the long latency expired the data would be valid, and latency would be quite good for such a low data rate. This seemed to indicate that somehting in the blocks used to select the stream was causing a delay - ie. inserting a lot of samples with the previous evaluated results where things would be misaligned. Either that, or the callbacks to set the new operands for stream selection were not "executing" right away. The specific offenders seem to be 1) constant source 2) and constant 3) mult_const. I haven't figured out why yet...
The end solution was to do a dumb selector block that just copied the specified input to the output. Derp...