Yes, you pay per second. But, per other notes, this is slated to save at most 2ms. Realistically, it won't save that much, as they are still doing a sort, not completely skipping it, but lets assume qsort does get this down to 0 and they somehow saved it all. That is trivially 500 boots before you see a second. Which... is a lot of reboots. If you have processes that are spawning off 500 instances, you would almost certainly see better savings by condensing those down to fewer instances.

So, realistically, assuming that Colin is a decently paid software engineer, I find it doubtable the savings from this particular change will ever add up to mean anything even close to what it costs to have just one person assigned to it.

Now, every other change they found up to this point may help sway that needle, but at this point, though 7% is a lot of percent, they are well into the area where savings they are finding are very unlikely to ever be worth finding.

Edit: I saw that qsort does indeed get it into basically zero at this range of discussion. I'd love to see more of the concrete numbers.