When working on Oracle systems, you will eventually hear some poor whiner say something like, "Oracle is a resource hog! It consumes every bit of resources it can get its despicable hands on!" Here's my response, "Yeah, ain't that great! Wouldn't it be a shame to have a user waiting for the application to respond when there are unused computing resources?" Shocked and taken aback, the complainer doesn't know how to respond.

Certainly, we want efficient uses of expensive computing resources. However, when those expensive resources are available, to not be able to use them while at the same time our users, whom we serve, are waiting for an application to respond is selfish on our part, and actually quite preposterous!

When a user is waiting for the application to respond and there are available computing resources, then parallelism is being limited and serialization has raised its ugly head. Serialization is death to performance maximization!