Ask HN: What are the numbers everyone should know in 2019?

When you’re designing a performance-sensitive computer system, it is important to have an intuition for the relative costs of different operations. In particular, he gives a useful table of “Numbers Everyone Should Know” — that is, the cost of some fundamental operations:

Some useful figures that aren’t in Dean’s data can be found in this article comparing NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3 from 2005. His figures suggest the best-case system call overhead is now only ~60 nsec (for Linux on Nehelem), and that context switches cost about 30 microseconds (30,000 nsec) — when you account for the cost of flushing CPU caches, that is probably pretty reasonable.

Source: everythingisdata.wordpress.com