[Iem3ohvi]

> Unless the programmer is programming at a very low level

If you write unixy tools that do just one job then you often have to deal with this. For example rsync and tar put files into sequential mode and perform readaheads or writebehind-drop the page cache.

And it's not just that kind of tool. At $JOB I did a fairly simple optimization to significantly reduce loadtimes (from NFS) in a render farm by importing a 3rd-party library which provided the necessary libc bindings for readaheads. It's only a dozen lines of code but reduces user-perceived latency from minutes to seconds. The PO was quite happy about not having to pay for hundreds of NVMe SSDs.