I think, the most important factor isn't so much the CPU, but loading binaries from disk. And that (I/O) improved quite massively over the 1990s. (And anything

I think, the most important factor isn't so much the CPU, but loading binaries from disk. And that (I/O) improved quite massively over the 1990s. (And anything written for spinning disks will start nearly instantly using solid state storage.) To illustrate the CPU/disk-access ratio: There's a reason for scripting languages becoming prevalent for web backends in the 1990s. Loading a script source from disk and precompiling it on the fly was still faster than loading a much bigger binary from disk – which had to be done on each CGI request. (E.g., with Perl, you could have your normal script, but you could also produce an executable binary from a core. But nobody did the latter for the exact reason.)