CPU bound and I/O bound?

Question

What do the terms "CPU bound" and "I/O bound" mean?

Answer 1

CPU bound means the program is bottlenecked by the CPU, or central processing unit, while I/O bound means the program is bottlenecked by I/O, or input/output, such as reading or writing to disk, network, etc.

In general, when optimizing computer programs, one tries to seek out the bottleneck and eliminate it. Knowing that your program is CPU bound helps, so that one doesn't unnecessarily optimize something else.

[And by "bottleneck", I mean the thing that makes your program go slower than it otherwise would have.]

Answer 2

When your program is waiting for I/O (ie. a disk read/write or network read/write etc), the CPU is free to do other tasks even if your program is stopped. The speed of your program will mostly depend on how fast that IO can happen, and if you want to speed it up you will need to speed up the I/O.

If your program is running lots of program instructions and not waiting for I/O, then it is said to be CPU bound. Speeding up the CPU will make the program run faster.

In either case, the key to speeding up the program might not be to speed up the hardware, but to optimize the program to reduce the amount of IO or CPU it needs, or to have it do I/O while it also does CPU intensive stuff.

Answer 3

Another way to phrase the same idea:

• If speeding up the CPU doesn't speed up your program, it may be I/O bound.

• If speeding up the I/O (e.g. using a faster disk) doesn't help, your program may be CPU bound.

(I used "may be" because you need to take other resources into account. Memory is one example.)

Answer 4

CPU Bound means the rate at which process progresses is limited by the speed of the CPU. A task that performs calculations on a small set of numbers, for example multiplying small matrices, is likely to be CPU bound.

I/O Bound means the rate at which a process progresses is limited by the speed of the I/O subsystem. A task that processes data from disk, for example, counting the number of lines in a file is likely to be I/O bound.

Memory bound means the rate at which a process progresses is limited by the amount memory available and the speed of that memory access. A task that processes large amounts of in memory data, for example multiplying large matrices, is likely to be Memory Bound.

Cache bound means the rate at which a process progress is limited by the amount and speed of the cache available. A task that simply processes more data than fits in the cache will be cache bound.

I/O Bound would be slower than Memory Bound would be slower than Cache Bound would be slower than CPU Bound.

The solution to being I/O bound isn't necessarily to get more Memory. In some situations, the access algorithm could be designed around the I/O, Memory or Cache limitations. See Cache Oblivious Algorithms.