I've always found that it's pretty amazing how much effective speed can be gained by thinking about your memory usage and doing things that "don't make sense", such as leaving requests compressed in memory. Even re-compressing them after decryption is "obviously" less efficient than not doing so ... except it' can be faster, even on servers with 192GB ram.

Half the articles on Go vs Java also make this point. "We're so much easier on memory usage than Java's Object and that alone gives us a XX% speed boost".

It also can become an extra layer of protection against thrashing when overloaded.

I wish people put more attention into this.