A single fundamental principle underlies the implementation of “mechanical sympathy” in software: make the topology of the software match the topology of the hardware as closely as possible. All of the various tricks and heuristics are just narrow cases of this single principle. Hardware architecture is immutable but software architecture is not.

It was how I learned to design code for supercomputers and is remarkably effective at generating extreme efficiency and scalability in diverse contexts. Importantly, it generalizes to systems of every shape and size. While it is difficult to get good results on a supercomputer if you don’t understand this, it works just as well for a random web app.