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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> The key is to understand the impact you CAN have, and what the business value of that impact is. :)

Like I tell everyone in system design interviews: AWS will rent you a machine with 32TB of RAM. Are you still sure about all this extra complexity?

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... to the tune of about 10 cents a second, yeah. If you can hire a dev team to optimize one of those out, you plausibly come out ahead (well, vs face value).

How do you come out ahead hiring an entire team to save $6/hour?

That's $6/minute, $360/hour. Granted, if you're using it at a scale approaching FTE costs, you probably want at least some reserved capacity and you're likely not paying face value, but then the comparison was never going to be rigorous anyway.

Oh, I’m an idiot. Sorry, ignore me.

That's not even the main problem with the comparison. Suppose it was actually $6/hour. Even that's >$50k/year, indefinitely.

How long does it take your team once to make that resource consumption go away permanently? An hour? Even a month? You'd still be ahead.

Working for a smaller digital agency, while using .NET Framework, and then moving to .NET Core (now just .NET) this savings was felt. Using a performance profiler and slightly complicating the code a bit (at least in terms of the documentation for the CMS we use), I was able to get the code in less than the minimum recommended requirements for the base CMS software, without having to alter the source of the CMS. I did this with the Umbraco CMS, but also started using it in 2013 when the documentation was lacking, so reading the source code was a requirement to getting as much as possible out of the software.

Hopefully if you’re doing something that actually needs that much RAM you’re also making 6-figures per hour in revenue.

I’ve heard that some companies spend hundreds of millions per year on cloud hosting and it’s still worth it. I can’t even imagine that level of scale.

PS: The context in which I bring this up is a design exercise that would deal with maybe 5gb of data per month. People really over-complicate it :)

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