I can't agree more with Joe Duffy's viewpoint. In case you're interested in a graphical representation [1] of some common latency costs, someone at UC Berkeley

I can't agree more with Joe Duffy's viewpoint. In case you're interested in a graphical representation [1] of some common latency costs, someone at UC Berkeley put together an interactive chart with the original Numbers Every Programmer Should Know from Jeff Dean's (Google) large scale systems presentation. [1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...