How to Rock a Systems Design Interview

Re:How to Rock a Systems Design Interview by jtchang on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @02:18AM (#3180878)

What is sad is that if you were to plot, say hard drive access times, on the same chart and just adjust the axis you'd realize that memory latency is orders of magnitude faster than any hard drive access.

All those access times are nanoseconds. Traditional hard drives are usually in the 4-8 millisecond range. Even SSDs clock in at around .2 milliseconds...which is 200,000 nanoseconds.

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Re:How to Rock a Systems Design Interview by luckydude on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @10:20AM (#3182130)

Take a trip through lmbench results, it's worthwhile. You'll get bandwidth and latency of disks, file systems, network, memory, as well as context switch costs.

It's a tiny set of tests and if you memorize the results you can sit in any design session, decompose a problem into the basic events, and prove that the design can or can not work in short order.

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