Not really heroic:

Some years ago, management decided to introduce business transaction monitoring. After finishing a call, the phone-agent got a formular full of checkboxes, radiobuttons etc. to fill in, what the last call was about.

That formular needs up to 16 seconds to process. Not good.

A lot of meetings was held, a lot of buzzwords spilled, a lot of money spend. Since I'm the admin, I had to prove that my servers, operating systems etc. were not the bottleneck. Being bored by the uproar caused by non-techs, I rewrote the formular using mod_perl instead of "highly optimized, enterprise-level, patented technology". Down to 8 ms (a factor 2000) to process.