If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I like to read about the latency of various computer operations. I find it fascinating but one could say that the data is abstract and dismiss it as “interesting but who cares?”.
Mohammad Zeya Ahmad has an informative post that answers that question. He has a list of how much time various common operations take. That’s interesting but what make his list stand out is that he draws conclusions from his results.
For example, SSDs are about 30 times faster than HDDs so if you have a high performance disk-based task, it makes sense to use SSDs. Of course, there are reasons to prefer HDDs but if performance is your controlling metric, SSDs are probably your best choice.
For each group of comparable metrics, Ahmad offers an actionable suggestion. Those groups range from CPU versus Cache and Memory speeds to network transfer times. None of the suggestions are going to turn you into an uber-programmer but they can help you squeeze more performance out of your program.
It’s a nice post and just might help you write better code. Even if it doesn’t, it’s interesting to see how long these common operations take.