Sorry if I sounded condescending. I didn't know the specifics of your system (is it mostly on the server side, embedded, etc...?) so I couldn't give you any spe

Sorry if I sounded condescending. I didn't know the specifics of your system (is it mostly on the server side, embedded, etc...?) so I couldn't give you any specific advise. The sort example was merely a metaphor for design for scalability vs. optimization for performance. Perhaps better examples would have been dividing the server side portion of your application into asynchronously invoked services is design for scalability. Rewriting some of these services in C or OCaml, switching from JSON to Protocol Buffers, switching from an HTTP server and a layer 7 load balancer to a custom non-blocking server and ZooKeeper (for cluster membership) are optimizations for performance/stability/cost.