Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

latency.txt

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
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L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory     250,000   ns      250 us
Round trip within same datacenter      500,000   ns      500 us
Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD*     1,000,000   ns    1,000 us    1 ms  ~1GB/sec SSD, 4X memory
Disk seek                           10,000,000   ns   10,000 us   10 ms  20x datacenter roundtrip
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk    20,000,000   ns   20,000 us   20 ms  80x memory, 20X SSD
Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA    150,000,000   ns  150,000 us  150 ms

Notes
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1 ns = 10^-9 seconds
1 us = 10^-6 seconds = 1,000 ns
1 ms = 10^-3 seconds = 1,000 us = 1,000,000 ns

Credit
------
By Jeff Dean:               http://research.google.com/people/jeff/
Originally by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers

Contributions
-------------
'Humanized' comparison:    https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375
Visual comparison chart:   http://i.imgur.com/k0t1e.png
Interactive Prezi version: https://prezi.com/pdkvgys-r0y6/latency-numbers-for-programmers-web-development/latency.txt

As an updated point of reference for the first few numbers, Apple give a table in their Apple Silicon CPU Optimization guide. You can see they are extremely similar to the original figures:

Just a note for whomever wants to use this as a reference: I personally understand this does not take queuing & contention into account.

Numbers should change when physical devices have contention (CPU, Memory buffers, NIO, Thread pools) so things might be slightly larger in the average case (usually you'd try to maximize utilization and tradeoff for some contention) and quite larger on worst case (when that optimization goes wrong or you botched the design with bad bottlenecks).

This is amazing work btw and I'm glad to see how the community has added specs, references and notes on top of it.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. This is not my original work; it's a community effort.

One more thing I gotta memorize 😔

Let's use 🍌 for the scale 👉

Operation	Time (ns)	Banana Units
L1 cache reference	0.5 ns	1 banana (one banana)
Branch mispredict	5 ns	10 bananas (ten bananas)
L2 cache reference	7 ns	14 bananas (fourteen bananas)
Mutex lock/unlock	25 ns	50 bananas (fifty bananas)
Main memory reference	100 ns	200 bananas (two hundred bananas)
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy	3,000 ns	6,000 bananas (six thousand bananas)
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network	10,000 ns	20,000 bananas (twenty thousand bananas)
Read 4K randomly from SSD	150,000 ns	300,000 bananas (three hundred thousand bananas)
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory	250,000 ns	500,000 bananas (five hundred thousand bananas)
Round trip within same datacenter	500,000 ns	1,000,000 bananas (one million bananas)
Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD	1,000,000 ns	2,000,000 bananas (two million bananas)
Disk seek	10,000,000 ns	20,000,000 bananas (twenty million bananas)
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk	20,000,000 ns	40,000,000 bananas (forty million bananas)
Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA	150,000,000 ns	300,000,000 bananas (three hundred million bananas)

In this table, each operation's latency is expressed in terms of the smallest unit—a single L1 cache reference, which is equivalent to 1 banana.

while I find the idea of a banana as a base unit of distance, it's not really helpful here. however, you could do a scale of distances, starting at the planck length in femto bananas or something.