It's plausible; I've been at a talk where they suggested checking the local cache and requesting it across the network in parallel. I'd thought maybe they were

It's plausible; I've been at a talk where they suggested checking the local cache and requesting it across the network in parallel. I'd thought maybe they were talking about, say, both people on a fast network, but digging into it, that's not the whole story. Wikipedia [1] has 5,400rpm hard drives having average rotational latency of 5.56ms. AT&T's real-time latency charts have a few spots with under 5ms latency, and that chart's just the average, I think, so these might be beatable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_characteristics#Rotational_latency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_ch... [2] http://ipnetwork.bgtmo.ip.att.net/pws/network_delay.html http://ipnetwork.bgtmo.ip.att.net/pws/network_delay.html