Obeying the speed limit

Everyday Salesforce.com publishes the number of transactions that take place on their servers, and the average speed in which all those transactions take place at http://trust.salesforce.com. For years, the average speed has consistently been well under 300 milliseconds. This extremely fast speed has remained the same despite the number of transactions growing to nearly 2 billion (with a B) per day! In general, the page load time for web pages is usually calculated in seconds and not in milliseconds, and the same is true for pages on the Salesforce1 Platform. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out then that for every page that loads in, say 3 seconds (a published best practice), there's got to be a very large number of transactions that are occurring in well under 300 milliseconds to balance it out. It's these extremely fast transactions that we care about because they are happening via Apex not through web page loads. It doesn't really matter how fast they...