Even in these modern times, when lots of things are changing in the ICT world, some lessons from the past still hold true.
Previously, I discussed the I/O stack in a typical database environment. As virtualization has complicated things a bit, the fundamental principles of performance tuning stay the same.
Recently I was browsing through old presentations of colleagues and found another interesting view on response times in an application stack. Again, I polished it up a bit and modified it to reflect a few innovations and personal insights.
The idea is as follows. We as humans have problems getting a feel of how fast modern microprocessors work. We talk in milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds. So – in the comparison we assume a 1 Gigahertz processor and then scale up one nanosecond to match one second – because this fits better in human’s view of the world. Then we compare various sorts of storage on the “indexed” timescale and see how they relate to each other.
