Conflating utilization with efficiency is a mistake that is made so often and so reliably that it probably alone explains why reporting on this is sparse. To u

Conflating utilization with efficiency is a mistake that is made so often and so reliably that it probably alone explains why reporting on this is sparse. To understand if a system is inefficient, I would have to know if the same computing could be performed at a lower total cost of ownership. The utilization of the actual specific resources is an input, but only to understand the computing demand. The reason it is so common to "throw servers at it" is because the hardware and even the power is very cheap compared to human labor costs; and there are significant labor efficiencies in deploying infrastructure in batches.