Why on earth should developers ever say "Ok, it's fast enough. We're done."
I mean, maybe temporarily done so that you can patch up some higher priority (more broken?) stuff, but DONE? Pushing the envelope is how you progress, and in this case also how you can learn.
Because at some point you will pass the point of diminishing returns. Suppose 3% of the time is spent in the server, and 97% in the web app. Do you really want to spend 200 hours trying to reduce that 3% to 2.5% instead of spending 10 hours on making your app twice as fast? You've made the server 20% faster, but what have you really gained in practice when you look at the overall picture?
Even assuming unlimited developer resources, will you really notice a 0.5% difference in production, especially when taking things like network latency into account?
My point is that hyping over raw performance is misleading at best. If performance is the only thing that matters then we wouldn't have operating systems with abstractions - everybody would program against the bare metal in assembly. One should weight the pros and cons carefully and reach a balanced trade-off.
It's about progression over time. If someone didn't do it, we'd be leaving significant performance gains behind. That means more servers, more electricity and more money for everyone.
I'm not going to do that for my app but it's nice that there are people making these improvements for the benefit of everyone that uses their server.
When you take into account many small improvements, across all deployments, over time, they can and do add up to significant improvements.
Totally agree with you. You dont really get 1000's of reqs/sec in a real world environment. All you need is a good server which is fast and memory efficient. Rest of the efforts should be focussed on the webapp side, more importantly DB. If you can work on your IO you will have a fast and efficient application.
I mean, maybe temporarily done so that you can patch up some higher priority (more broken?) stuff, but DONE? Pushing the envelope is how you progress, and in this case also how you can learn.