Originally posted by down1
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Imagine a website that can serve up 1,000 pages per second with no delays - every page is served up immediately. Or you can tweak a setting and it can serve up 5,000 pages per second.
Much better, right? You need 5 times fewer servers! Except that now 10% of the pages served take 30 seconds before the user sees them while the other 90% are still immediate, leading to massive complaints about the website being down and unresponsive from 10% of your users even though the server is doing a lot more work more efficiently.
Often times a little unfairness is acceptable, but once it reaches a large enough scale it's no longer worth it. That's the basis behind real-time operating systems, FYI - they are stricter about guaranteeing that low latency/high fairness for critical applications that really need it, while your typical desktop OS is ok with not everything being perfect.
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