One thing that strikes me about this article is the examples of companies that move from one system to another (whatever that move entails) and achieve big perf

One thing that strikes me about this article is the examples of companies that move from one system to another (whatever that move entails) and achieve big performance wins. We see long articles about this very often here. Sometimes it's moving from relational to non, sometimes it's moving back. But what really throws me for a loop is that so many of these sites are so mind-bogglingly, face-punchingly slow. All of Atlassian's web properties are stupidly slow. AirBNB (mentioned in this particular article) also--painfully slow. Github--slow. Reddit--somewhat slow almost always. Twitter--slow. Facebook is usually the exception. I realize that sounds like maybe I'm just on a slow connection, but I'm not. I don't know where the time is being eaten up if it's not in the database. But I feel bad for all the people working on db performance when the end result is so bad. I don't understand how websites whose only purpose in life is to serve text and images as fast as possible can be so slow and that the companies that make them can find this acceptable. No database technology in the world can make up for bad product decisions and companies that don't consider speed a feature.