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> If the value was in your L1 cache the difference in access time is 100 ns vs 1 ms which is an order of magnitude faster.

I see this mistake all the time, even in print! It's millis -> micros -> nanos, so...that's a lot more than a single order of magnitude.



Tangential, but what I appreciate about Elixir/Erlang is that you have ETS out of the box that is basically a key-value store on a lightweight Erlang process (without socket access or network calls) with flexible 'types', and then DETS brings persistence, mnesia adds schemas, queries, transactions, replication and other DBMS-like features... all this and you can use Erlang's actor model to cluster and horizontally scale, or just use it like a simple L1 cache, as described in the article


> order of magnitude

that phrase (for countless years) feels like an attempt to sound precise, but is imprecise. great example there.


Most people use "order of magnitude" to mean "by a factor 10". I've always thought this was inappropriate. The origin of this expression is that the scientific use of magnitude implies a logarithmic scale. But "magnitude" was first used in astronomy with a scale that had a 2.5 base, not a 10 base.


Forget micros, even if nano came after milli, it's still 3 orders of magnitude!




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