Hardware and software have progressed over the years. Latencies for various operations put things into perspective. The latency numbers for 2013 are as shown in the following table. (Reproduced with the permission of Aurojit Panda and Colin Scott of Berkeley University: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html)
Operation |
Time taken as of 2013 |
---|---|
L1 cache reference |
1 ns (nano second) |
Branch mis-predict |
3 ns |
L2 cache reference |
4 ns |
Mutex lock/unlock |
17 ns |
Compress 1KB with Zippy (http://code.google.com/p/snappy/) |
2 μs (1000 ns = 1 μs : micro second) |
Send 2000 bytes over commodity network |
500 ns (that is, 0.5 μs) |
SSD random read |
16 μs |
Roundtrip in same datacenter |
500 μs |
Read 1,000,000 bytes sequentially from SSD |
200 μs |
Disk seek |
4 ms (1000 μs = 1 ms) |
Read 1,000,000 bytes sequentially from disk |
2 ms |
Packet roundtrip CA to Netherlands |
150 ms |