> Even programmers and IT professionals have literally not mental model of how fast computers really are.
Or of how slow light is!
Or of how slow light is!
I’ve been to America a few times. The internet is so fast there: not because of bandwidth differences, but because of latency, and especially sites carelessly loading chains of resources, which amplify the effects.
As soon as you deal in intercontinental stuff, you realise just how slow light is.
(As for studies in the effects of page load abandonment, those are never in the slightest bit relatable—at the time those studies suggest half the people are giving up, most sites still haven’t rendered anything at all, here.)
Then you notice a small button at the right bottom corner, that button allows you to auto-scroll at the speed of light, wow, now that’s slow!
[0]https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_ac...
Yes, this is why it won't happen, with our current understanding of physics, and the practical limitation that implies, with the resources we have. ;)
sad piano plinks
https://files.mtstatic.com/site_4539/12414/0/webview?Expires...
This means it's required infinite energy to reach c speed for any mass.
And c speed is quite slow for space travel.
Just for the fun of it, let's imagine humanity has assembled, in space, an aircraft-carrier sized vessel, fully equipped to function and nurture the little humans living inside of it.
Weight: 100 ktons.
Power is infinite ok, because badly rewarded nerds discovered new physics. Good for them they are now immortals of human history.
With Lorentz kinetic energy equation, one can estimate the kinect energy this vessel would have while traveling at say, 1% of the speed of light.
Energy: 4.5*10^20 J.
This is about two thirds of the total energy Earth receives from the sun in one hour. Or close enough to the energy the world consumed in 2017.
Now we have humans inside a vessel hurdling through space at 0.01 c, in addition to the pre-existing humans in a planet swirling through space. But there is a problem! It would take 424 years to reach the nearest star system. So we need to go faster and maybe break things. Hopefully not the hull, though.
F*** it let's go 0.5 c and reach Andromeda in about 9 years - long enough to write a book.
Energy: 1.4*10^24 J.
That's 3x the energy released by the Chicxulub meteor impact. Or 30+ times the 2003 world's total fossil fuel reserves.
Which raises the question what is the fuel being used?
Doesn't matter ok because new physics, we are transforming mass literally in energy no constraints 100% efficiency lol.
By e=mc^2 that fuel would weight - at least - 14.9 ktons.
There is margin for error, since the vessel would be shedding mass, and getting lighter. That would allow engineering to run the global process at 80% efficiency, which is a very realistic metric and maybe miss a turn or two on the way to the neighboring star.
Returns not included.
I suppose the question is where do you want to go and how much luggage do you want to take with you?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-speed-of-li...
Speed of light is not exactly a relatable point of reference.
The performance of everything is limited in one way or another by ‘c’.
Not just WAN links, but the data centre Ethernet as well. The distance to the disks matters. The physical size of the motherboard. The placement of caches, etc…
When people say things like “putting the compute near the data” they’re implicitly talking about overcoming the limits imposed by the speed of light.
When you hear about an N+1 performance issue in some ORM, that’s bad because of the speed of light.
When you test your LAN with “ping”, you’re lying to yourself because it won’t show measurements below 1 ms, which is an eternity.
I just told you how much compute can occur in just 10 nanoseconds.
Go ping something. Look at the “1 ms” in the output. Go back to my post and work out what can occur in 1,000,000 nanoseconds. Go look at the 1 ms again.
Repeat until you have an epiphany about your zone redundant Kubernetes-hosted cloud native microservices architecture.
Your ping is 156,000 nanoseconds. You just saw that you can in principle do about 6,400 computations per 30ns, so... that's about 33 million arithmetic calculations per round-trip, within the data centre.
I hope this makes you see every unnecessary network hop in a different light.
PS: It typically takes 3 round-trips to establish a TCP connection, and 5-7 for a TLS connection. A database connection over TLS needs a few more. And then you have load balancers, firewalls, proxies, envoy, ingress, dapr, and, and, and...
Datacenter Ethernet has too much overhead to make a difference in almost all cases. Disks have an even higher overhead:distance ratio. The size of a motherboard only matters for signal integrity, not that half a nanosecond extra. Cache location inside a chip can matter, but even then size is a significantly bigger factor than location.
Oh group velocity.