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Measures

Every programmer knows the numbers every programmer should know. They act as metrics and measurements. When we know them, other numbers can be guaged against them to gain "a measure". A measure makes difference. Having "a measure" is often a matter of experience. Once having a measure, numbers have a meaning. In fact having "the measure" might be the definition of experience.

In software engineering, what is considered an important measure is not always same for everyone. The community finds common ground in what they have in common. Hence the numbers every programmer should know are the latencies and throughputs in computer systems building blocks. They are based on hardware and current physical limitations. The longer I have been in the field of software development and design, the more I appreciate measures and actively seek them.

Not having a measure is like not knowing where you are at the point of space because there is no concept of unit. It's ok to not have a measure as well. I realize I like to remember few measures which are not present in the standard programmer's toolkit. Below is my list of measures to which I keep getting back to from time to time. Its not complete. Sometimes the most useful measures change a lot. Measures are not absolute, although they often seem to be. It may not look obvious, but measures are not even numeric until they suddenly are.

There is a reason why measures and rulers share the meaning.

What are your measures?

MeasureValue
English Wikipedia without images53 GB
SSD random read16000 ns (16µs)
Round trip within same datacenter500 µs
Packet round trip from EU to US100ms
Human brain FLOPS (they say)10 PFLOPS
Neurons in human brain (they say)10^11 (100B)
Synapses in human brain10^15 (1 quadrillion)
H10060 TFLOPS
M12.6 TFLOPS
M1 Pro10.4 TFLOPS
Apple A182K GFLOPS
The surface area of earth510M km²
Atoms in observable universe10^80
L1 cache reference1 ns
L2 cache reference4 ns
Main memory reference100 ns
Mutex lock17 ns
Body spasm inducing current6 mA
Deadly current for human80 mA
Scientific population8 M
Developer population30 M
Videogamer population2.6 B

Inspired by many.