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Taking the following issues in the count, what would be the descending order from greatest to least of bottlenecks in a computer system?
- Network I/O
- Disk I/O
- RAM I/O
- Graphics I/O
- Processing I/O
I'm often explaining the concept of what can make a machine appear slow, and I'd like to get a good idea of what's mostly the greatest to lowest bottlenecks in a system. Considering an average computer which has a decent 7200RPM hard disk, an average 500 kilobytes per second up/down network connection, average speed RAM, a dual-core 2GHz processor, and a fairly cheap video card, what'd be the order of my list above? I'd assume it'd be the way I wrote it, but I'd like to be sure.
What are the greatest and least causes for bottlenecks in hardware and I/O?
3Highly dependant on what it was going to be used for. I would take ram off the slow list :-), until some sort of storage media can get anywhere close :-) The internet is always "slow", 500k is even slower, but how nessisary it is to be fast depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to do great games, you need great graphics card, even if the cpu might be a bit weak. still , depends on the game. Cpus do a lot of amazing processing fast, but they should be 2x faster if they were moving up the same way as before. – Psycogeek – 2012-01-08T16:42:00.693
2If you want your absolute roughest bottleneck list. First off is the Disk I/O. This will affect everything from boot times, running applications and even surfing the net. If your target user is gaming then obviously it will be the graphics card. – kobaltz – 2012-01-08T16:50:26.680
The question really does not make much sense. Since every operation or transfer will take a finite amount of time, the slowest or longest operation or transfer will probably be a "bottleneck". So are you just asking for an ordering of transfer speeds or data rates? But even the fastest (single) operation/transfer done repetitively for a long time will look like a "bottleneck"! – sawdust – 2012-01-08T22:59:09.023
1@Psycogeek: RAM should stay on the list, even though data rates for RAM are a lot faster than all peripherals. Consider that most BIOSs have a "fast boot" option that eliminates a RAMemory test: most people don't like waiting for the RAM test to finish. Do something long enough, and it becomes noticeable and a "bottleneck". – sawdust – 2012-01-08T23:07:56.933
The question is really ill-specified. It always depends on what you propose to do. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten – 2012-01-09T20:23:36.943