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Did... I read this correctly? One thousandth of a second...?

Wow.

This means the processing of the transaction on a node could happen quickly, but we're still bound by network lag time to transmit this data to other nodes, correct?

Oh wait. This means the state change can happen in 1 ms. The only lag would be the time it would take to send / receive communication through the internet to obtain the current state?

Ahh, we need more info. :)

Your transaction should not require 3 seconds to execute. If your transaction is so complex it takes 3 seconds to execute, the chain should reject it as a denial of service attack. :P

Apply will need a short period of time during which it can make its changes, but those changes should be very fast (updating some database entries). If you're doing crazy complex, multi-millisecond computations in your smart contracts, you're probably doing it wrong, but in any event you'll need to break it up over multiple transactions because the block producers won't let you hog all the CPU time and starve out all the other users.

Yeah, that's max limit to execution! I remember when DAO was hacked there was counter measures (intentional spamming) that caused delays on contract execution... looking forward to learn more