The point of the textured cube analogy was that if you don't consider the context of the benchmark, the numbers aren't useful. The kid doesn't realize that if

The point of the textured cube analogy was that if you don't consider the context of the benchmark, the numbers aren't useful. The kid doesn't realize that if texturing a cube brings a framerate down from 1200 to 800 fps, is as significant as going down from 62 fps down to 60. Even though that is only a 2 fps difference. A 400% performance gain is a constant performance improvement. I don't think a system like nginx + memcached have linear performance benefits in the first place.