Totally depends on your workload and hardware. I have a normal consumer SSD in my desktop and it can easily sustain 7GB/s (56gbps) as long as I only use 700GB o

Totally depends on your workload and hardware. I have a normal consumer SSD in my desktop and it can easily sustain 7GB/s (56gbps) as long as I only use 700GB of the 2TB available. A normal server has enough PCIe lanes for 15 SSDs like mine so a normal server's IO bandwidth is comparable to its memory bandwidth. More expensive servers have faster lanes (PCIe 5.0) and more of those lanes. Anyway the OP's file only has 1B rows so it'll be ~1GB compressed which fits in memory after the first discarded run. IO bandwidth shouldn't matter in this scenario: > All submissions will be evaluated by running the program on a Hetzner Cloud CCX33 instance (8 dedicated vCPU, 32 GB RAM). The time program is used for measuring execution times, i.e. end-to-end times are measured. Each contender will be run five times in a row. The slowest and the fastest runs are discarded Edit: The github repo says it's 12 GB uncompressed. That confirms that IO bandwidth doesn't matter