&gt; After all, programmers are expensive. Hardware is cheap.<p>Except in China.  I worked at a US company that did almost zero optimization on their code, deploying to 5000 AWS instances with a team of about six.  In China, bandwidth closely followed by CPU were the cost centers, and the Chinese team of 30 engineers optimized the same code to run on around 50 (admittedly beefy) servers.