I’ve seen an entire company proudly proclaim a modern multicore Xeon with 32GB RAM can do basic monitoring tasks that should have been possible with little more than an Arduino.
Except the 32GB Xeon was far too slow for their implementation...
Which is, I still believe is perfectly possible to do.
Then, I was ‘what?!’
There were thousands of threads, murmuring an incessant hum fully occupying a few cores when absolutely nothing was happening. Over 20GB RAM actively used at idle.
I think booting the application took almost half an hour at one point, using a local SSD.
I’m fairly certain at no point in my career could I ever have replicated such a monstrosity.