> In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane.
Yeah. I've got my search engine basically a beefy gaming PC with no graphics card and 128 Gb ram. I've not only gotten supposed HN death hugs multiple times, I've had my search engine see multiple queries per second without as much as flinching. It took Elon Musk tweeting a link to one of my blog entries before I started getting more traffic than my computer could handle and it started dropping a few connections.
Modern consumer PCs are ridiculously powerful if you make good use of the hardware.