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I/O Techniques
Input/output (I/O) processing is notoriously slow compared to CPU processing. For exam-
ple, memory (RAM) access time is measured in nanoseconds, compared to milliseconds for
typical (non-SSD) hard disks, a million times slower. A simple read or write operation from
an Excel le in MATLAB can take many seconds.*
These examples illustrate the reason why in many applications I/O is the performance-
limiting factor. In such application, there is usually no use spending time to tune the data
processing (CPU-intensive) or data (memory-intensive), since the I/O tends to be the domi-
nating factor. Owing to I/O’s relative slowness, ev ...