If a CPU cycle took one second

A modern processor does something every third of a nanosecond. That is too small to mean anything, so let's cheat. Stretch time until one processor cycle lasts one full second, then scroll through everything else a computer waits for, at that scale.

Every bar below is drawn to scale. When a bar gets too long for any reasonable thumb, the ruler changes, and we'll tell you how far you would have had to scroll without the change.

Scroll ↓

0 swaiting to start

So what does a business do with this?

Nothing in your office runs at the speed of the processor. It runs at the speed of whatever the processor is waiting for. A screen that makes forty separate trips to a server in another state is not slow because the computer is slow. By the computer's clock, it is waiting out forty lifetimes, one after another.

That is why the cheapest speed-ups are almost never new hardware. They are fewer round trips, work done once instead of on every click, and data kept close to where it is used. You fix the waiting, not the working.

The whole table

EventReal timeIf a cycle were 1 second

Source. The latency figures are from Brendan Gregg, Systems Performance, as transcribed in the widely shared scaled-latency table that assumes a 3.3 GHz processor and an SSD of about 1 GB per second. They describe hardware from roughly the last decade. Today's fastest NVMe drives answer in tens of microseconds instead of fifty or more, so read the bars as orders of magnitude, not benchmarks. Where the source gives a range, the solid bar is the low end and the dashed outline runs to the high end. Distances assume the CSS standard of 96 pixels to the inch.

Highland Willow, 2026-10-29.

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