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[ARTICLE · art-9684] src=gist.github.com ↗ pub= topic=developer-tools verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

The article presents a table of approximate latency times for common computer operations, ranging from L1 cache references (0.5 ns) to transcontinental network round trips (150 ms). Compiled by Jeff Dean and originally by Peter Norvig, the data provides programmers with a reference for understanding the relative speed differences between CPU caches, main memory, SSDs, disks, and network communication.

read1 min views18 publishedMay 31, 2012

latency.txt

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Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)

----------------------------------

L1 cache reference 0.5 ns

Branch mispredict 5 ns

L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache

Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns

Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache

Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us

Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us

Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns 250 us

Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns 500 us

Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD* 1,000,000 ns 1,000 us 1 ms ~1GB/sec SSD, 4X memory

Disk seek 10,000,000 ns 10,000 us 10 ms 20x datacenter roundtrip

Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 20,000,000 ns 20,000 us 20 ms 80x memory, 20X SSD

Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns 150,000 us 150 ms Notes

-----

1 ns = 10^-9 seconds

1 us = 10^-6 seconds = 1,000 ns

1 ms = 10^-3 seconds = 1,000 us = 1,000,000 ns

Credit


By Jeff Dean: http://research.google.com/people/jeff/

Originally by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers

Contributions


'Humanized' comparison: https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375

Visual comparison chart: http://i.imgur.com/k0t1e.png

Interactive Prezi version: https://prezi.com/pdkvgys-r0y6/latency-numbers-for-programmers-web-development/latency.txt

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