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> In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.

What aspects of the hardware would lead to 500ms response times?

Underpowered CPU being asked to do way more work than it properly has capacity for.

Plus 400 layers of abstraction because the lowest bidder doesn't know any actual software engineering and every time they face a problem they add yet another library to the project that someone on SO mentions because the accompanying sample code in the answer has the least amount of lines.

This absolutely boggles my mind. I had to do some javascript recently, and every time I had what I thought was a very basic question the most upvoted answer was "just npm install this library, and use this one-liner". I honestly never experienced this before with any other language, it's horrifying.

I bet the "underpowered CPU" is way faster than the supercomputers of not that long ago.

Way more work, as in, turn up the volume or display another thing on the screen?

How do you explain that not that long ago, when CPUs were slower, interfaces were faster?

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