I have seen applications in such environments, well written too, degrade rather quickly because someone configured the environment without consideration for and of the ramifications of these modern system aspects.

No kidding! When we started experiencing major application slowdowns in an ERP system we wrote/maintain for a fairly big client, I had a very hard time convincing the boss that his experience on smaller systems was not relevant, and that running "simulations" (contrived data) on his Mac laptop was not the same thing as instrumenting the application and collecting *real* data over time. One of the few times as a mid-level programmer where formal CS education actually paid off. The real issue was masked by layer upon layer of misconfiguration. It took weeks of finally sitting down and properly reconfiguring the application environment (Java, ick) just to get the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where the logs were producing useful info. Turns out no tuning at all had been done, ever. Still running with the stock single-threaded database connection pool, the one that basically everyone says, "yeah, don't ever use this for a real production app." It just finally hit a tipping point where "good enough" was no longer good enough. Thanks, Jonathan