minneslatens

Minneslatens, or memory latency, is the delay between issuing a memory read or write and the moment the data becomes available to the processor. In computer architecture, latency is a critical component of memory performance and is distinct from bandwidth, which measures the rate at which data can be transferred. Latency is heavily influenced by the memory hierarchy, including CPU registers, L1/L2/L3 caches, main memory (DRAM), and storage systems. Each level adds a delay due to decoding address translation, hit/miss events, and physical access times.

Typical latencies in modern systems are on the order of nanoseconds for caches and tens to hundreds of nanoseconds for main memory. For example, data fetches from L1 data cache usually occur in a few cycles, L2 cache in a slightly higher number of cycles, L3 cache in tens of cycles, while DRAM access can take dozens to hundreds of nanoseconds, highly dependent on memory technology and row-buffer state. Access patterns strongly affect observed latency: sequential or streaming accesses can benefit from prefetching and spatial locality, while random access incurs more misses and higher effective latency.

Factors that increase memory latency include cache misses, TLB misses, page faults, bank conflicts in DRAM, and interconnect contention. Latency is a key consideration in performance-sensitive workloads, where algorithms and data structures are designed to maximize locality and reuse. Techniques to reduce effective latency include improving data locality, explicit or hardware prefetching, larger cache sizes, and memory virtualization strategies. Measurement of memory latency is common in microbenchmarks and benchmarks, reported in nanoseconds or processor cycles.

Minneslatens is thus a central concept in evaluating and optimizing computer systems, influencing response time, interactivity, and real-time performance.