Comment by pjdesno

My take on it - performance decays when engineering management doesn’t prioritize it.

Modern example: Laptops boot in seconds. My servers take about 5 minutes to get to Linux boot, with long stretches of time taken by various subsystems, while Coreboot (designed to be fast) boots them nearly as quickly as a laptop.

Old example: early in my career we were developing a telecom system with a 5 min per year (5 9s) downtime target. The prototype took 30 minutes to boot, and engineers didn’t care because management hadn’t told them to make it boot faster. It drove me nuts. (a moot point, as it eventually got cancelled and we all got laid off)