I'm curious: do you see any speedup from that Hadoop cluster? I always assume that on less than like 5 nodes it is faster to just run it all on a single machine

I'm curious: do you see any speedup from that Hadoop cluster? I always assume that on less than like 5 nodes it is faster to just run it all on a single machine unless you are highly disk bound. Was it written that way in order to support future growth?