[digitalzombie]

> Nobody cares how long it takes to train a model.

That's a reckless generalization. I care.

My thesis would take forever if I didn't do any optimization. Also my data is 20 rows with ~6000 predictors.

There are models out there that can take months! I worked on one that took months. We had to tweak it and optimize it to see if we can get it to acceptable training time.