I've found the slowdown from hadoop to be very problem dependent. I've seen anywhere from no slowdown to 1000x slower. It sounds to me like those projects sho

I've found the slowdown from hadoop to be very problem dependent. I've seen anywhere from no slowdown to 1000x slower. It sounds to me like those projects should never have been using hadoop in the first place. If your problem is not IO constrained naturally, moving it to hadoop will make it IO constrained. In my experience doing that will get you a 10x-100x slowdown versus a more appropriate solution on the same hardware. If your problem is IO constrained, for example processing 10 TB of log data, hadoop will get all your disks to 100% utilization just as well as anything else will. It will leave your processors horribly underutilized, but that's just the nature of IO constrained problems. If you could get 10 TB of ram dedicated to your dataset then you could easily get a massive speedup over the hadoop solution but that's just not realistic.