At the bottom of the plant database I saw this and wondered "what is a jiffie?

Just curious

A jiffie is a variable measure of time, for a woman it is a matter of seconds and for a man it is a matter of hours. For example, my wife will say "I'll just rush and and talk to my friend, I'll be back in just a jiffie."


http://whatis.techtarget.com/d...

But what has that to do with the database search home page? And what is being measured?

Oh, you want meaningful information. Guess maybe Dave could answer that, I notice the value changes each time I load the page, so maybe it is a measure of the time it takes the page to load.

Seedfork is exactly right. A jiffy is 1% of a second (meaning, it takes 100 jiffies to make a second) and the number appears because it's telling you how long it took the server to generate that page.

ATP is actually a software program. Each page is created automatically by the software and it takes computational resources to generate those pages. Particularly heavy pages get the timer so I can monitor if a page is taking too long to load.

A jiffy is 1% of a second.

Wow, that is pretty fast. I won't be using that term when I say, I can do it in a "jiffie".

Thanks Dave, inquiring minds you know.
Thanks Jay and Seedfork too, I love learning new things.

I will forever think of that word in a different light now.

In nuclear physics, a "shake" is 1% of a microsecond. In other words, ten nanoseconds. Just as a jiffy is ten microseconds.

It was supposed to have come from the Manhattan Project and derived from "two shakes of a lamb's tail", for very very fast lambs.

And now it will be attached to a lamb in my mind.