[rbanffy]

If you are in the 10+ server league, you already are in that 1% where code efficiency and performance become more important than iteration speed or ease of development. In fact, it would be interesting to map where this transition occurs ;-)

And computers are cheap, regardless of how many you have. You say a datacenter with 50K servers is expensive, but imagine how bad would it be to maintain a building with 50K programmers...