Many apps/things can run with 100x overhead and nobody should care. Look at your salary, add ~50% for corporate overhead and compare this to the savings you'd

Many apps/things can run with 100x overhead and nobody should care. Look at your salary, add ~50% for corporate overhead and compare this to the savings you'd generate using market pricing of cloud resources (even if you don't use cloud). Can you beat this with, say, a 3 years discounting plan for the savings? In a lot of cases the answer actually is "clearly not". Sometimes you can eek out very sizeable gains, but always do the capitalist homework first (and the engineering homework of profiling second) before trying any fixes. Also, if it's performance that you need look into "stupid" solutions first. Can you move the DB to flash with just a few config options? Can you mlock() it in RAM? You'd be surprised how many things fit in RAM, especially if your DB is a managed distributed solution, and still be very cheap compared to engineering salaries.