It is usually hard to get an idea of how the time taken for various fundamental operations varies, and it does matter, but it’s hard to viscerally get it (time intervals in nanoseconds, microseconds, milliseconds aren’t really felt in the same way).

I came across this idea of representing the smallest number as a single second and everything else in terms of it, so that the relationship between the numbers is represented in more of a human scale, which results in the following table:

Op Latency Table

I wanted to show this in a chart, but it never shows more than the last two values, so I had to break it down into a series of smaller charts (I could use a log scale to represent them too, but that would’ve again lessened the impact you feel when seeing these numbers side by side)

Mostly similar, as long as it’s on the chip

 

This is a big jump!

Tremendous jump! Main memory latency is like 0.1% of the SSD access time!

… so imagine how much slower disk is, compared to RAM.

And if that was slow, you should check out the internet …

… exceeded only by an operation on the “machine”; this is finally when we can feel seconds ticking by.

Op Latency 6

Obviously, the worst thing you can do is try to restart the “real” system.