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How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

colin-scott.github.io

11–20 of 225 posts

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#11
post #5

The slider is very bad UX : I missed it too at first. It is not pronounced enough, partly because it is all the way to the right. A former boss would say : make it red .

It's really hard to notice the grey slider when the content are already red, green, blue, and black.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#14
post #11
post #5

The slider is very bad UX : I missed it too at first. It is not pronounced enough, partly because it is all the way to the right. A former boss would say : make it red .

It's really hard to notice the grey slider when the content are already red, green, blue, and black.

Blinking Magenta then.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#15
post #13

Today I learned that I don't know any of these numbers that "every" programmer should know. Where do I turn in my programmer card, Jeff Dean?

You could take this instead as an opportunity to learn them, instead of reveling in your ignorance.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#17
Not an intuitive thing but the data is fascinating. A couple of notes of people who are confused by it:

1) The 'ns' next to the box is a graph legend not a data label (normally that would be in a box labeled legend to distinguish it from graph data)

2) The weird box and rectangle thing on the top is a slider, I didn't notice that until I was looking at the code and said "what slider?"

3) The only changes from 2005 to present are storage and networking speeds.

What item #3 tells you is that any performance gains in the last decade and a half you've experienced have been driven by multi-core, not faster processors. And that means Amdahl's Law is more important than Moore's Law these days.

Re: How “latency numbers everybody should know” decreased from 1990–2020

#18
post #13

Today I learned that I don't know any of these numbers that "every" programmer should know. Where do I turn in my programmer card, Jeff Dean?

I don’t think it’s important to know the absolute numbers but rather the relative values and rough orders of magnitude.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to developers why their network attaches storage has higher latency than their locally attached NVME SSD

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