Doesn&#x27;t invalidate the point; another EC2 instance is a few dozen bucks a month to run full time; another developer, even overseas, is going to cost you more, at just 40 hours a week.<p>But that said, it&#x27;s rather a good thing to point out for the OP, as Joe Armstrong himself tends to value programmer time over a machine&#x27;s, and that micro-optimizations are rarely ever worth it (as opposed to yours, which sounds like there were huge, glaring algorithmic issues to fix with macro optimizations, complete replacements of algorithms rather than tightening up code, careful profiling and tweaking to get a 30% speedup in one critical section, etc)