[dyladan]

I believe that the gist is not really meant to provide accurate numbers in every case. Especially with things like network latency, it is very difficult to say that any time is the 'correct' time because it will be different in any case. The real purpose of the gist, which is posted at regular intervals here, is to illustrate the order of magnitude differences between e.g. the L1 cache and L2 cache latency. It is meant to get a programmer to think about cache locality. If I can keep something in L1/L2 cache, it will be orders of magnitude faster than something that needs to make regular round trips to main memory, which is orders of magnitude faster than something that needs to make regular round trips to disk, and so on.

[1maginary]

I guess I took the title too literally. I would expect every competent programmer to know what you explained, and that is probably what the title was alluding to.

Thanks for clarifying.