Looking for a Google post on "How much time does it take do to X"

Question

I remember reading a post by someone at Google with several ballpark statistics such as how much time does it take to:

• Obtain a lock
• Read/write a piece of data from registers, memory, disk, remote disk
• Fetch a page
• ...

(Don't catch me on the exact statistics). Can you help me find this post?

Answer 1

This may not be what you're looking for, but Steve Souders of Google maintains a blog and touches on some of these web app performance topics in many of his posts: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/

His latest post on John Rauser (Amazon)'s presentation at Velocity 2010 may be of interest to you.

Edit: You'll also be able to find on his site a power point presentation on front-end optimization which is pretty interesting and has a lot of tips on how to make your site load (or appear to load) faster.

Answer 2

This was not the original article that I had in mind, but this article does give order of magnitudes for several of these operations.