[marktangotango]

From a capacity planning perspective, your goal should be 100% cpu utilization per box. Allocating excessive, unutilized wall clock time is wasted capacity. Same applies for ram/heap per call. These are the same considerations that played out in client/server vs mainframes for so many years.

Mainframe budgeting of cycles, memory, an IO was highly effective and efficiently utilizing resources. It's a model of computation that has disappeared, but is still relevant. When google app engine first came I had hoped it would utilize this model, but instead went the containerization route.