The only endpoint to ever do anywhere near as little work as this example would be the heartbeat. Most of the cost comes from a combination of a bunch of things

The only endpoint to ever do anywhere near as little work as this example would be the heartbeat. Most of the cost comes from a combination of a bunch of things other than simply fetching some data from a local device: - Web-anything is fetched off of a DB nowadays. That's another crapton of latency, because a) it's just easier to understand its characteristics if it runs on a separate system and b) most companies IME have either no DBAs at all or the DBAs have no time to look in depth at every system being built. So the DB resources are vastly underutilized, and the DB itself is badly understood. - Cache invalidation is still the hardest problem, and every caching framework I've looked at seems to gloss over that part. Just cache all the things and hope people retry enough times to get the latest update. I would love someday to work on a system where things are aggressively cached at every level and invalidated at every level and with perfect granularity. - Building for web scale from the beginning is premature optimization for the vast majority of companies. In the vanishingly unlikely scenario that the company actually grows 100-fold or more it makes sense to start investing heavily in performance. Of course, this also has the knock-on effect that the vast majority of software developers never get anywhere near a web scale system. OTOH it creates jobs for millions of developers, some of whom might end up building at scale someday. Another elephant in the room is that building anything at web scale is just not something anybody straight into the workforce is anywhere near qualified for. We desperately need more focused learning (mentoring, pairing, etc.) across the board to bring everybody up to speed faster.