I've been always interested in scrapping a bit more my application... no matter its level: frontend, framework or native. That's why I guess I have decided to study a bit more Software Systems. Some weeks ago, I was implementing some tests to evaluate my current project in terms of "time spent for certain operations". In addition, I had to force some cache/memory fault, work on some *non* cache-friendly program and, at the end, I was thinking about other aspects of my system. Usually, for software systems, we pretty much focus on latency and bandwidth. For example, when you are developing an application to have an efficient access to memory (cache-friendly!), you are thinking about latency, as you want to avoid (expensive) access to a lower-level memory. Of course, depending on the operation (network, memory access, etc.), latency and bandwidth have a bit different meaning. For example, for network, latency is measured by sending a packet that is returned to the sender. For memory access, latency can be explained as "the delay time between the moment a memory controller tells the memory module to access a particular memory column on a RAM module, and the moment the data from the given array location is available on the module's output pins". [Wiki]

I took a look on some amazing links that gave me a very precise and detailed view about such discussion and here they are:

• Herb Sutter @ NWCPP - This is an amazing talk.It shows how your program actually uses your machine's architecture;
• Gerson Robboy Lecture Note - Very good lecture notes with some examples and exercises;
• Great stackoverflow post;
• Table with interesting numbers about latency;
• Latency through a Java perspective;