6 ms·

Cloud customers are also living in the land of millisecond latency for most things. Their customers are at the other end of a multi-ms round trip. Sharding re

Cloud customers are also living in the land of millisecond latency for most things. Their customers are at the other end of a multi-ms round trip. Sharding reduces the need to push as many IOPS through a single database machine, leaving slack for higher storage latency. For people who really need low latency in the cloud there is EC2 instance store or GCE local SSD.

jiggawatts 5y ago
That's not how latency works. It doesn't matter if the user running Google Chrome is 50ms away from the web server, if that server in turn does 10,000 round-trips to the database server. Suddenly, microseconds matter. Why 10K round-trips you ask? Because of ORMs like Entity Framework. They have a habit of producing wildly inefficient query code, but hey... it saves on developer time! I literally just optimised a large web site that actually had fairly decent SQL queries. I reduced the latency from 1,500 microseconds to about 50 microseconds and the performance of most pages improved by about 150-300 milliseconds! Let me reiterate: A latency difference that can't even be benchmarked easily because it's so small made a very noticeable difference to page load times. The site feels snappier. Navigating it is now a joy instead of a drag.