Happiness is ... making the most of limited resources

I know it is not normal to feel so good about this, but when processing large amounts of data coming from a slow network file system, going through 64 cores and 256 GB with nary a blip in CPU activity or memory pressure … well, one does get a little depressed. As Madeleine Albright once observed, what’s the point of all that processing power and memory if you are never going to use it or some such thing.

When a simple pipeline works, it feels good:

CPU utilization graph

Sometimes it feels too close to the edge:

Graph showing steadily increasing memory use

See also Can Parallel::ForkManager speed up a seemingly IO bound task?