Time Dilation

I riffed on this a bit over at twitter some time ago; this has been sitting in the drafts folder for too long, and it’s incomplete, but I might as well get it out the door. Feel free to suggest additions or corrections if you’re so inclined.

You may have seen this list of latency numbers every programmer should know, and I trust we’ve all seen Grace Hopper’s classic description of a nanosecond at the top of this page, but I thought it might be a bit more accessible to talk about CPU-scale events in human-scale transactional terms. So: if a single CPU cycle on a modern computer was stretched out as long as one of our absurdly tedious human seconds, how long do other computing transactions take?

If a CPU cycle is 1 second long, then:

• Getting data out of L1 cache is about the same as getting your data out of your wallet; about 3 seconds.
• At 9 to 10 seconds, getting data from L2 cache is roughly like asking your friend across the table for it.
• Fetching data from the L3 cache takes a bit longer – it’s roughly as fast as having an Olympic sprinter bring you your data from 400 meters away.
• If your data is in RAM you can get it in about the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee; this is how long it would take a world-class athlete to run a mile to bring you your data, if they were running backwards.
• If your data is on an SSD, though, you can have it six to eight days, equivalent to having it delivered from the far side of the continental U.S. by bicycle, about as fast as that has ever been done.
• In comparison, platter disks are delivering your data by horse-drawn wagon, over the full length of the Oregon Trail. Something like six to twelve months, give or take.
• Network transactions are interesting – platter disk performance is so poor that fetching data from your ISP’s local cache is often faster than getting it from your platter disks; at two to three months, your data is being delivered to New York from Beijing, via container ship and then truck.
• In contrast, a packet requested from a server on the far side of an ocean might as well have been requested from the surface of the moon, at the dawn of the space program – about eight years, from the beginning of the Apollo program to Armstrong, Aldrin and Collin’s successful return to earth.
• If your data is in a VM, things start to get difficult – a virtualized OS reboot takes about the same amount of time as has passed between the Renaissance and now, so you would need to ask Leonardo Da Vinci to secretly encode your information in one of his notebooks, and have Dan Brown somehow decode it for you in the present? I don’t know how reliable that guy is, so I hope you’re using ECC.
• That’s all if things go well, of course: a network timeout is roughly comparable to the elapsed time between the dawn of the Sumerian Empire and the present day.
• In the worst case, if a CPU cycle is 1 second, cold booting a racked server takes approximately all of recorded human history, from the earliest Indonesian cave paintings to now.