Not to nitpick (because I found the rest of the article fairly interesting), but it seems like he has a poorly chosen metaphor right off the bat. "The key to s

Not to nitpick (because I found the rest of the article fairly interesting), but it seems like he has a poorly chosen metaphor right off the bat. "The key to solve this problem lies in the classical definition of speed. In Physics, speed is defined as the distance divided by time required to cross that distance. So we can make the requests run faster either by decreasing the time, but we can also do it by shortening the distance." If S = D/T, then to increase speed while holding time constant, you'd need to increase distance, not decrease it. I think it would be better if we thought about the performance he is talking about as what it really is... throughput. If you have a big pipe spewing water, you can increase the throughput by either increasing the pressure of the water (optimized code) or by removing the rocks in the pipe (long-running/synchronous I/O threads). (Removing said rocks increases cross-sectional area.)