Another bottleneck in addition to file or network I/O can be memory consumption. It's been my experience that trading off extra CPU work for lower memory consum

Another bottleneck in addition to file or network I/O can be memory consumption. It's been my experience that trading off extra CPU work for lower memory consumption can make a world of difference when your application is paging (which is I guess just I/O). So in looser terms, the algorithms I write may be purposefully less optimized in order to reduce memory consumption. Like more iterations, more scans, more stuff instead of sticking references in memory.