Posts on Insights

Favorite Sayings by John Ousterhout – Precious Experience and Advice for Building Systems

By Eric Z Ma,
John Ousterhout is a professor of Deparment of Computer Science from Stanford University. One recent project he is working on is the RAMCloud, a “new class of storage, based entirely in DRAM, that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than existing storage systems”. He posts his “Favorite Sayings” on his homepage. These sayings are precious experience and advice for building systems and developing software and they deserves really careful reading. » Read more

Software Engineering Advice from Building Large-Scale Distributed Systems by Jeff Dean

By Eric Z Ma,
Software Engineering Advice from Building Large-Scale Distributed Systems by Jeff Dean. You can download the slides from Software Engineering Advice from Building Large-Scale Distributed Systems by Jeff Dean. These slides contain the “Numbers everyone should know” which everyone working on systems should be familiar with. Numbers Everyone Should Know ∞ L1 cache reference 0.5 ns Branch mispredict 5 ns L2 cache reference 7 ns Mutex lock/unlock 100 ns Main memory reference 100 ns Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 10,000 ns Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network 20,000 ns Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns Disk seek 10,000,000 ns Read 1 MB sequentially from network 10,000,000 ns Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 30,000,000 ns Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns » Read more