[GFK_of_xmaspast]

> Outside of similarly exceedingly high throughput situations, CPUs are normally more than fast enough, especially if the application in any way brushes up against people and thus falls into "human time" scales, in which case you'd typically be hard pressed to make things slow enough for someone to notice.

This has simply not been my experience. (In a previous job I had reasonably optimized numerical python code sitting on the back end of an api and it was incredibly easy to go over our time budget).

[existencebox]

For what it's worth, I believe you; I'd be curious what the workload was / what the time window was, if you're able to say?

I could certainly see myself as having been spoiled with respect to beefy hardware and feasible workload/SLA ratios, but it's lead me to a prior where I take the age old advice against premature optimization pretty aggressively. (Starting projects in python, naive brute force implementations for a first pass, readability over a better O(N), etc)