What is Digg?231 Comments
- tanmaker, on 07/13/2009, -5/+546Did anyone else sit there for a minute waiting for it to load, even though it was finished?
- DevinWatson, on 07/14/2009, -3/+194Needs more SSD...
- PakoBedejo, on 07/14/2009, -27/+199Damn people, zoom in & look at upper-left of picture. It's a good visualization if you're not ***** retarded.
- FredFredrickson, on 07/14/2009, -5/+130When this finished loading, all I saw was a red bar on the side, and for a second, I thought the page had had trouble loading. Then I noticed that this red bar was actually an automatically resized image in FireFox. I clicked it with the magnifying glass, and WHOA! that's a *****-ton of latency.
- BREZZZ, on 07/14/2009, -2/+117Your brain latency would fill the screen hundreds of times over.
- merreborn, on 07/14/2009, -2/+107Well *****, I'd better uninstall my user and buy a faster one then.
- Frixionburne, on 07/14/2009, -4/+104Wrong, the user is slower.
- istumbler, on 07/13/2009, -2/+88Yes.
- sHockz, on 07/14/2009, -10/+83is this a surprise to any techie? if so plz hand your boss your 2 weeks notice now, your in the wrong job.
we have known for a long....long time that the HDD is obviously the slowest component of the PC. - primatage, on 07/14/2009, -1/+70i would have if you hadn't warned me.
- primatage, on 07/14/2009, -3/+69This is genius.
- colincornaby, on 07/14/2009, -3/+68Unfortunately, SSD barely makes a dent in this...
- coderdevo, on 07/14/2009, -0/+62I like to compare memory access to drinking milk.
L1 = Take a sip from your glass of milk.
L2 = Glass is empty. Go to your refrigerator and pour a new glass from the milk bottle. See L1.
RAM = Bottle in refrigerator is empty. Go to store. Buy a bottle of milk. Go home. Put bottle in refrigerator. See L2.
Disk = Breed a cow with a bull and hope for a female calf... - AmyVernon, on 07/14/2009, -2/+48Apparently, I was. But now I just feel bad about my lack of intelligence. Thanks a lot, PakoBedejo.
- kingfoot, on 07/14/2009, -0/+44how?
i didnt get it and i asked if someone could help explain it to me.
*****. - NodOfficer, on 07/14/2009, -1/+43How about:
L1 Cache (1ns)
L2 Cache (4.7ns)
RAM (83ns)
Hard Disk (13,700,000ns) - jakerandell, on 07/14/2009, -0/+41Kinda defeats the whole "visualization" part.
- NJank, on 07/14/2009, -1/+39my monitor can't show logarithmic pixels.
- NJank, on 07/14/2009, -2/+36needs more cowbell
- Thue, on 07/14/2009, -1/+32Nope - I have 0.3ms roundtrip response time to the server down in the basement, over ethernet. 0.3ms < 13.7ms.
- xyphur, on 07/14/2009, -1/+32I believe those numbers are based on extremely old hardware. I don't think we've seen RAM with latencies that high since... hm, 30-pin SIMMs? In fact I remember some of my 72-pin SIMMs being 50 & 60ns back in the day...
Most DDR2 modules typically have latencies anywhere from about 12 to 20ns, give or take. DDR2 also runs higher latencies than standard DDR. Regardless, the highest latency you'll see any current module running is roughly 25ns. So I don't know where they're getting that number from. (perhaps I should read the cited source blog? there's an idea...)
That hard drive access time is another odd value. Hard drives have been consistently under 10ms now for ages... - KibibyteBrain, on 07/14/2009, -3/+33Not really, the time it takes to perceive changes in environment for humans is only a few times more than the HDD. It takes 160 ms for humans to respond(i.e. hit a button) to audible stimuli on average, which implies the brain actually can detect and process the stimulus in just a fraction of that time.
- BluSkreenOfDeth, on 07/14/2009, -0/+28But i counted 13,700,001 pixels...
- cire84117, on 07/15/2009, -0/+28Mentioned in the sourced article was comparing to the distance light travels in this time. Well to expand:
C * time = distance
1ns = ~30cm
4.7ns = 1.4m
83ns = ~25m
13.7ms = 4,100km - Awwzm, on 07/14/2009, -3/+29Great. Now my vision is ***** up.
- yaazz, on 07/14/2009, -1/+26zoom in to the image and go to the top
- Wilarico, on 07/14/2009, -17/+42red stripe? makes me want a beer.
- lensman00, on 07/14/2009, -2/+26HDD are much slower than RAM, and RAM is now plentiful. So why do 'modern' systems (including nearly all single-user systems) still rely on virtual memory paging in a generalized layer which is allocated to the hard drive?
With current hardware we should be using systems with all the program code and much of the application data resident in RAM, at least on the client side. All this disk thrashing we put up with is an artifact of computing theory which is 15-20 years out of date. - CATSCEO2, on 07/14/2009, -1/+24HOORAY BEER!
- shadowspawn, on 07/14/2009, -4/+27They say freak when you're singled out. Well the red, it filters through.
- loneraver, on 07/14/2009, -0/+22You should download more ram.
- aywwts4, on 07/14/2009, -0/+22That would be considerably less meaningful, while useful to fit on a single page of a printed medium, this digital image has no such restriction. Humans are notoriously bad at comprehending large numbers or the scale of an order of magnitude, this accurately reveals the scale unlike a logarithmic scale.
- KibibyteBrain, on 07/14/2009, -0/+19RAID 0 does not reduce latency at all, it only increases the throughput. In fact, RAID can only possibly increase the latency to access the volume.
- fireashes, on 07/14/2009, -7/+26Latency of various media (1 pixel per nanosecond). Based on http://duartes.org/gustabo/blog/post/what-your-com ...
L1 Cache (1ns)
L2 Cache (4.7ns)
RAM (83ns)
Hard Disk (13.7ms) - eatporktoo, on 07/14/2009, -0/+19actually, in this case SSD < HDD (in terms of latency of course)
- Jeepinator, on 07/14/2009, -0/+18Ethernet sends a signal at almost the speed of light. There are no moving parts. The reason a hard disk takes so long, relatively, is that it has to move the arm to the correct location on the disk heads.
- byakkun, on 07/14/2009, -0/+17Needs memristors in electronics. Hopefully physicists will rescue the planet again.
- UselessTrivia, on 07/14/2009, -0/+17I remember back in the late 90s someone came out with a "RAM Drive" that was a PCI card with like 8 RAM slots on it. At the time you could get about a gig of memory onto the thing. You had to plug it into a wall socket so that it had constant power even when the drive was powered down, or else your RAM would get cleared and you'd lose the data.
I saw a demo of it once where a guy had loaded Quake3 onto it and it loaded the software in about 2 seconds. - Zomgondo, on 07/14/2009, -0/+16Virtual memory paging is what allows your system to do all kinds of wonderful things like confining each application in its own memory space and pre-emptive multitasking... you really don't want it to go away.
The algorithms could do with a bit of tuning though. - kingfoot, on 07/14/2009, -0/+16yesh i zoomed in the first time but didnt see the top.
now i saw it, now it makes sense. - merreborn, on 07/14/2009, -5/+21While the author obviously selected the scale he did for dramatic impact, any chart designer worth his salt would probably recommend a non-linear scale (e.g. logarithmic) for more meaningful representation.
- Jeepinator, on 07/14/2009, -0/+15Every time you power off your computer the RAM is erased, so the hard drive is always going to have to be read at least every start up. Windows Vista has RAM cacheing for programs that you use often. You can even cache the whole OS if you want to. The capability for what you want is in the software we run, manufacturers just need to start building in more RAM. Dell needs to stop charging 300 bucks for a 4gb upgrade.
- Davers, on 07/14/2009, -2/+16Perhaps that explains why none of YOUR virtualizations are on the front page of Digg.
- Pyrolistical, on 07/15/2009, -0/+14Sure SSD doesn't compare to ram, but HDD does not compare to SSD either.
Going from 13.7 ms to 0.1 ms is huge - kent1146, on 07/14/2009, -0/+14I always say yes, more SSD.
But to be fair, colincornaby is right. SSD's wouldn't really make a dent, since they have access times of 0.1ms. That is still several magnitudes of scale slower than RAM, or L1/L2 cache. - FredFredrickson, on 07/14/2009, -0/+14I only mentioned it because I don't know if any of the other browsers do that. Take it easy there, champ.
- manacit2, on 07/14/2009, -0/+12Mine has a 4200RPM drive
***** yes - AmyVernon, on 07/14/2009, -2/+14Same here.
- NJank, on 07/14/2009, -2/+13this is useless to someone who's already aware of it. clever maybe, but not too much.
BUT, it's a wonderful notice to say, an undergraduate computer engineer or scientist who is just learning computer architecture and "Why you don't want to touch the on disk cache if you don't have to", etc. - mysql101, on 07/14/2009, -0/+11these days they contain a small battery and a SD type flash drive. So when you lose power, they write to a flash disk that doesn't need power to keep the content alive.
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