sirupsen/napkin-math resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

5671 stars · 233 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A collection of memorized latency/throughput numbers, benchmark code, and techniques for estimating system performance from first principles (napkin math). Includes Rust benchmarks re-measured on modern cloud hardware plus practice problems and a newsletter.

Use cases

• estimate how long it takes to read 1 GB of memory
• estimate storage costs for logging at 100k RPS
• learn back-of-envelope systems performance estimation
• refresh latency numbers for modern cloud hardware
• practice systems design interview estimation questions
• decide whether a design is feasible before benchmarking

When to choose

• you need quick first-principles performance estimates for system design
• you want up-to-date hardware latency numbers with benchmark code
• you're preparing for systems design or SRE interviews

When to avoid

• you need precise, production-grade benchmarking of your own workload (use fio or dedicated profilers)
• you want a runnable performance monitoring tool rather than reference numbers

Facets

learning-resource · maturity active

benchmarking developer-tools developer-tools performance infrastructure-as-code tutorials cross-platform napkin-math latency-numbers systems-performance capacity-planning back-of-envelope-estimation sre performance linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="sirupsen/napkin-math")