I agree with most of what you said, except hardware isn't really all that cheap. I used to think so, but recently have run up against some "that's all this box

I agree with most of what you said, except hardware isn't really all that cheap. I used to think so, but recently have run up against some "that's all this box can do?" and "this throughput costs this much?" and "why is this so slow" with fairly good algorithms but a lot of data and rps. So I've been a tad more perf forward lately than in the past.