Abstract
Put those times on a human scale by setting 1ns CPU time = 1s human time
- a clock cycle is ~0.1-0.2s, which is more or less instantaneous for humans. This could be, for example, the time to add 2 small numbers that you already have in transistors.
- If you need to read them off of a page in front of you (L1/L2 cache), that could take a few seconds
- A System Call (系统调用) takes a few minutes
- Context Switch is an hour or two
- HTTP Request takes several hours
- You need to wait a day to read something from SSD
- Writing to SSD it’s gonna be in the mail for around a week
- Seek time of HDD is like 2 months
- Data over the network from another continent that’s a few years
- TLS handshake is like a decade
- Transfer 1GB over network in same cloud region - that’s like 3 centuries