[jiggawatts]

The knee-jerk reaction I get to any proposed database tuning is: "That sounds expensive, let's just throw more cores at it to solve the scalability issues."

Of course, tuning is often a one-time activity and cores cost money monthly, but they ignore that.

They also ignore that if one user gets a poor experience, then it is by definition not caused by a lack of scale. Conversely, it will cause scalability issues, but that's a side effect and not the root cause.

I'm starting to suspect that 90-98% of all "web-scale" architectures are compensating for errors like this. Nobody has tried to use the "release" build, add an index, or just use a binary data format.