And don't underestimate "changing environment". As Brad said, "in 2007, using local disk wasn't restricted ... in 2012, containers get tiny % of local disk spin

And don't underestimate "changing environment". As Brad said, "in 2007, using local disk wasn't restricted ... in 2012, containers get tiny % of local disk spindle time ... cluster file systems own disk time on your machine, not you." Within Google today, if you're directly using local disk instead of the Google storage stack, you're going to have a bad time. Even more so if you're calling read() from a single-threaded event loop.