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Everything that needs to be written has already been written. But since no one was reading, everything must be written again.

Latency numbers every programmer should know

L1 cache reference ......................... 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict ............................ 5 ns
L2 cache reference ........................... 7 ns
Mutex lock/unlock ........................... 25 ns
Main memory reference ...................... 100 ns             
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy ............. 3,000 ns  =   3 µs
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network ....... 20,000 ns  =  20 µs
SSD random read ........................ 150,000 ns  = 150 µs
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory ..... 250,000 ns  = 250 µs
Round trip within same datacenter ...... 500,000 ns  = 0.5 ms
Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD* ..... 1,000,000 ns  =   1 ms
Disk seek ........................... 10,000,000 ns  =  10 ms
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk .... 20,000,000 ns  =  20 ms
Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA .... 150,000,000 ns  = 150 ms

Assuming ~1GB/sec SSD

Visual representation of latencies

Visual chart provided by ayshen, HTML version at here.

Data by Jeff Dean

Originally by Peter Norvig