It’d be fun, however, if we could dynamically adjust that according to workload. If workload is light, you could consolidate load into fewer sockets/memory sticks and power down everything in that socket.
We’d see serious latency spikes with high volume increases. And high volume would correlate to high I/O on shared storage exacerbating the problem. You’d get a bunch of transactional failures from the spontaneous latency hit.
Same was true with older virtualization/partitioning of hardware. You’d even see apps back up into memory and swap themselves to death.
Now, the apps were awful: inefficient and intolerant. But that’s the reality for the vast majority of business software. Churned out by devs with little understanding and tight timelines for features.
Reliability being an NFR kills me.