Well, I can only second what InclinedPlane already said and would like to add: While your idealized calculation [naturally] supports your point, it doesn't matc

Well, I can only second what InclinedPlane already said and would like to add: While your idealized calculation [naturally] supports your point, it doesn't match up with what I've seen in reality. In most companies you don't have one programmer per rack but many programmers per rack. The hosting costs are usually dwarfed by the programmer salaries, often as much as to make the former appear as a rounding error. Consequently you should in almost all cases optimize for developer-performance, not for software performance.