> Working on improvements like this makes a lot of sense in academia, when you are running thousands of servers, or when you need so much memory that you can't buy a big enough server.

It also makes sense for all desktop and mobile apps, per gnyman’s point on not hitting individual limits. Also for anything that other people will be running, like libraries. Because your thing might perform marvelously in isolation on a beefy dev machine and still run like ass on every user’s somewhat underpowered computer with ten other apps competing for RAM (hello Slack).

See also: “craptop duty”[1]; how the 512K Mac reduced the competitive advantage of MS’s ruthlessly-optimized office apps but the MultiFinder, né Switcher, restored it[2].

[1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/

[2] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...