[otabdeveloper1]

> The client doesn't seem to care, and just sees the 5-20 second webpage load times as totally normal

Yes, but will they tolerate 2 minute page load times? 10 minute?

At some point reality kicks in and you start to have to care about the nuts-and-bolts hardware.

[oblio]

Most of the time those things are caused by gross development errors, not by cache hits. Stuff like looping while sending an individual SQL query for each record.