Latency Numbers You Should Know (2022)

Mar 4, 2022

Do you have an idea of roughly how many times faster it is to read a value from an SSD or over the internet from across the world?

It's not important to know the exact speeds, but understanding relative orders of magnitude can make a difference when designing a program. Seeing the difference visually is also helpful.

These numbers change so often that it's difficult to find a current benchmark. Here are some current numbers from Colin Scott's blog.

https://colin-scott.github.io/personal_website/research/interactive_latency.html