[globular-toast]

I have a similar story where I reduced the memory used by a script from 1TB (yes, TB) to a few megabytes. The runtime was massively reduced too, from something like 1 day to a few minutes.

This was for a genomics project and they ran it on a supercomputer. When I looked into it, they were reading the entire input into a giant array before doing one pass and dumping the result out to disk. I made a tiny change (it was a Perl script) to make it stream the I/O instead.

This is the most extreme example I've come across of people using computing power just because it's there. Nobody questioned why the script took so long to run because the data really was in the TBs and other stuff also took that long to run. Waiting a day for the results was considered normal. I see the same thing on desktop apps etc., on a much smaller scale, of course. When I run an electron app it takes several hundred milleseconds to do anything at all. But nobody questions whether it should because everything takes several hundred milliseconds.