If you see a database query that takes 1 hour to run, and only touches a few gb of data, you should be thinking "Well nvme bandwidth is multiple gigabytes per second, why can't it run in 1 second or less?"
The idea that anyone would accept a request to a website taking longer than 30ms, (the time it takes for a game to render it's entire world including both the CPU and GPU parts at 60fps) is insane, and nobody should really accept it, but we commonly do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
Just as an example, round trip delay from where I rent to the local backbone is about 14mS alone, and the average for a webserver is 53mS. Just as a simple echo reply. (I picked it because I'd hoped that was in Redmond or some nearby datacenter, but it looks more likely to be in a cheaper labor area.)
However it's only the bloated ECMAScript (javascript) trash web of today that makes a website take longer than ~1 second to load on a modern PC. Plain old HTML, images on a reasonable diet, and some script elements only for interactive things can scream.
mtr -bzw microsoft.com
6. AS7922 be-36131-cs03.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net (2001:558:3:942::1) 0.0% 10 12.9 13.9 11.5 18.7 2.6
7. AS7922 be-2311-pe11.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net (2001:558:3:3a::2) 0.0% 10 11.8 13.3 10.6 17.2 2.4
8. AS7922 2001:559:0:80::101e 0.0% 10 15.2 20.7 10.7 60.0 17.3
9. AS8075 ae25-0.icr02.mwh01.ntwk.msn.net (2a01:111:2000:2:8000::b9a) 0.0% 10 41.1 23.7 14.8 41.9 10.4
10. AS8075 be140.ibr03.mwh01.ntwk.msn.net (2603:1060:0:12::f18e) 0.0% 10 53.1 53.1 50.2 57.4 2.1
11. AS8075 2603:1060:0:10::f536 0.0% 10 82.1 55.7 50.5 82.1 9.7
12. AS8075 2603:1060:0:10::f3b1 0.0% 10 54.4 96.6 50.4 147.4 32.5
13. AS8075 2603:1060:0:10::f51a 0.0% 10 49.7 55.3 49.7 78.4 8.3
14. AS8075 2a01:111:201:f200::d9d 0.0% 10 52.7 53.2 50.2 58.1 2.7
15. AS8075 2a01:111:2000:6::4a51 0.0% 10 49.4 51.6 49.4 54.1 1.7
20. AS8075 2603:1030:b:3::152 0.0% 10 50.7 53.4 49.2 60.7 4.2Uber could run the complete global rider/driver flow from a single server.
It doesn't, in part because all of those individual trips earn $1 or more each, so it's perfectly acceptable to the business to be more more inefficient and use hundreds of servers for this task.
Similarly, a small website taking 150ms to render the page only matters if the lost productivity costs less than the engineering time to fix it, and even then, only makes sense if that engineering time isn't more productively used to add features or reliability.
Microservices try to fix that. But then you need bin packing so microservices beget kubernetes.
I always liked Shaw’s “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”