title: CPU bound applications vs. IO bound
body: <p>For 'number-crunching' style applications that use alot of data (reads: "hundreds of MB, but not into GB" ie, it will fit nicely into memory beside the OS), does it make sense to read all your data into memory first before starting processing to avoid potentially making your program IO bound while reading large related datasets, instead loading them from RAM?</p>
  
  <p>Does this answer change between using different data backings? ie, would the answer be the same irrespective of if you were using XML files, flat files, a full DBMS, etc?</p>