GoKawiilTechnical blog argues database CPU bottlenecks often trace to memory latency, not raw compute
A technical blog post explains that a CPU showing 100% utilization may not actually be fully working, because much of that time can be spent waiting on memory accesses rather than executing instructions. It breaks down the latency gap between CPU cores and memory tiers, noting RAM access can take 50-100ns versus roughly 1ns for L1 cache, meaning a CPU could execute 400-800 instructions in the time it takes to fetch data from RAM once.