By skyforbes 
Every few months, the tech world rediscovers a truth that’s as old as the mainframe: computers are fast, but cloud bills are faster.
Case in point — TikTok reportedly saved $300,000 a year after an intern rewrote part of a Go microservice in Rust. Not a full rewrite. Not a heroic all-nighter by a crack performance team. Just an intern and a partial refactor.
The results read like a benchmarking fairy tale:
- CPU usage dropped from 78% to 52%,
- Memory usage fell from 7.4% to 2.07%,
- p99 latency went from 19.87ms to 4.79ms,
- and the service handled twice the traffic.
That’s not “slightly better.” That’s “your SRE just high-fived your CFO” better.
The Myth of “Optimization Is Pointless”
There’s a certain tech cliché that goes: “Computers are fast, and developer time is expensive.” It’s the motto of every startup sprinting toward product–market fit, every engineering manager terrified of scope creep, and every tech lead who’s watched one too many heroic optimizations turn into spaghetti.
And to be fair — that’s true, at least for a while. At small scale, optimization often doesn’t pay back the…