A lot of the slowness for most sites comes from the client side, not the server side. Ads, tracking scripts and UI elements done in jQuery when you could have j

A lot of the slowness for most sites comes from the client side, not the server side. Ads, tracking scripts and UI elements done in jQuery when you could have just beem HTML strings. Using a CDN is also a cost effective way of putting stuff close to your users in cases where the asset transfer is the bottleneck. If processing is the bottleneck then adding geographically distributed hardware isn't going to help too much. In my experience until you get into really crazy micro optimisations the clean way to do something is often relatively fast too. I've much more often seen code that is horribly slow and horribly messy than just one of those.