This is a fantastic post by Erik where he explains the nuance between IO-bound and CPU-bound operations in programming.

… libraries have dedicated APIs for I/O scheduling work, separate from other types of operations

…. but why is this the case? Why don’t we use a single thread pool for all background operations? The operating system will handle the scheduling of these threads the same

I love how this specific question is framed (a good interview question for advanced mobile developers):

What you need to know about RAM, memory, CPU Processing and other important stuff that could tell you why your computer is slow.

Physical RAM/Memory

RAM chips funcion quite literally like your Computer’s Memory. All the information that needs to be remembered when operating between different tasks (or even the same task) gets stored here. You know how people who have great memories can be awesome, that translates to the computer world as well, more memory = more awesome. So 8GB » 4GB » 2GB » 1GB » (this is 2011, don’t even consider anything less than 1GB).