Computer Latency at a Human Scale

For example, each core of a server based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 v4 family might perform 2.4 billion clock ticks—and might execute many times that number of instructions—in the second or so that it takes to read and register this fact. [1] The book is a few years old, so here is a table with a couple of updates based on the clock speed of the Intel Xeon processor E5 and with some additional enterprise storage technologies thrown in:[2]

Now, as with any performance numbers, there is room to quibble over the specifics of these numbers. But if, for example, your application uses microservices—if you are essentially turning program function calls into network calls—the latency difference between memory and storage pales in comparison to the latency that network and Internet calls will introduce.

Source: www.prowesscorp.com