Comment by busterarm

I/O _can_ be optimized. I know someone who had this as their fulltime job at Meta. Outside of that nobody is investing in it though.

I'm a platform engineer for a company with thousands of microservices. I'm not thinking on your desktop scale. Our jobs are all memory hogs and I/O bound messes. Across all of the hardware we're buying we're using maybe 10% CPU. Peers I talk to at other companies are almost universally in the same situation.

I'm not saying don't care about CPU efficiency, but I encounter dumb shit all the time like engineers asking us to run exotic new databases with bad licensing and no enterprise features just because it's 10% faster when we're nowhere near experiencing those kinds of efficiency problems. I almost never encounter engineers who truly understand or care about things like resource contention/utilization. Everything is still treated like an infinite pool with perfect 100% uptime, despite (at least) 20 years of the industry knowing better.