Or anything for that matter. Write amplification or giving the computer "unnecessary, mandatory work" is one of the two big causes of poor performance despite ludicrously high performance hardware.

The other is latency. It's a metric that may as well not exist in the minds of 99% of developers or architects, but is the most important one by far.

If you ever wondered how it's possible to have 100 physical servers hosting an application that's glacially slow while no single part of the entire thing is running at more than 5% utilisation, these two are sufficient explanations most of the time:

    Work amplification + ignoring network latency.

Have you not ever wondered why something like Jira takes 10-30 seconds of wall clock time to display an empty form with less than 1 KB of text displayed on the screen?

It's burning through 100 million CPU cycles per byte that it's showing you! That's how.

That... or its server is twiddling its thumbs waiting for the network 29.99 seconds out of 30.00 seconds.

It's one or the other: There are no other options!