[Negitivefrags]

People incorrectly use the term “IO bound” or “bottlenecked by IO” without thinking about it all the time.

Like they will talk about how their web app is IO bound because the DB query takes 1 second while their slow ruby code only takes 300ms after it gets the result from the DB back.

Well guess what, making the web app twice as fast still cuts 150ms off the response time, and it still means you can do twice as many requests on the same server.

In order to be able to say that something is “bound” by something else, you have to have some kind of concurrency going on. One task has to be doing all it’s work in the time that it’s waiting for more work to arrive from another.