You're actually on to my point which is to stop doing low margin activities and focus on high margin activities. Low margin activities are where writing a page in C / C++ might be a really good idea. The performance critical parts of your site can always be rewritten in assembler if need be.
If your margin on a page request is 5% your business is probably fucked anyway (unless your serving billions of pageviews per month, there are only a few sites that work on this business model). I'd much rather have a business with orders of magnitude fewer requests and a profit margin on the order of 10s of thousands per page request.
What do you think 37Signals margin on a page request for basecamp is? My guess is at least 10,000%.
"You're actually on to my point which is to stop doing low margin activities and focus on high margin activities."
That's something I would certainly endorse. I didn't get that out of your post, I completely agree. Engineers who start companies often overlook this fact and focus on the entirely wrong set of problems when building their business.
If your margin on a page request is 5% your business is probably fucked anyway (unless your serving billions of pageviews per month, there are only a few sites that work on this business model). I'd much rather have a business with orders of magnitude fewer requests and a profit margin on the order of 10s of thousands per page request.
What do you think 37Signals margin on a page request for basecamp is? My guess is at least 10,000%.