I think that's part of it. But there's also a lot of badly designed software around. On the web it's not just the network. It's bloated, easy to misuse, framewo

I think that's part of it. But there's also a lot of badly designed software around. On the web it's not just the network. It's bloated, easy to misuse, frameworks that cause every small operation to take millions of cycles. In the backend I've seen all sorts of "slow" from taking hours to aggregate millions of records (where you should be able to do a billion in less than a second), to things slowed down by choice of wrong technologies or languages, to ridiculous overheads of wrangling data in and our of various serialized formats and passing it around with heavyweight stacks. What drives me crazy ;) is that many software developers have no sense of what is a "reasonable" amount of time/resources to accomplish certain workloads. If they can't even tell or have never seen anything that's high performance then they just think this is normal. No sense of, how many operations per second a CPU can perform, memory and disk performance etc. The slow performance is just normalized in a team.