Applications for which you can be sure that no other applications are running on the same box, either:
1. Because it's completely airgapped from the bigger internet and you control everything on it. Think complex embedded systems like radar HW control on military ships. The ships I was sailing on had 6 full racks per radar just for things like track maintenance and missile up/downlink scheduling. At some complexity level it becomes worth it to "lift" apps out of the embedded domain and make use of the facilities a bigger OS like Linux provides, but you often still have fairly tight realtime and performance requirements. A HFT server only connected to an exchange server could also count.
2. You have adequate security measures in other parts of your setup that, after carefully evaluating the risks, you decide to forego defense-in-depth in this part of the system.
There are not all that many fields where this type of microsecond chasing is all that worthwhile though. There are significant costs and risks involved and most web users won't ever notice a page load increase of of few microseconds. There are way more cost-effective performance improvements available for 99+% of companies out there CPU pinning and IRQ isolation.
1. Because it's completely airgapped from the bigger internet and you control everything on it. Think complex embedded systems like radar HW control on military ships. The ships I was sailing on had 6 full racks per radar just for things like track maintenance and missile up/downlink scheduling. At some complexity level it becomes worth it to "lift" apps out of the embedded domain and make use of the facilities a bigger OS like Linux provides, but you often still have fairly tight realtime and performance requirements. A HFT server only connected to an exchange server could also count.
2. You have adequate security measures in other parts of your setup that, after carefully evaluating the risks, you decide to forego defense-in-depth in this part of the system.
There are not all that many fields where this type of microsecond chasing is all that worthwhile though. There are significant costs and risks involved and most web users won't ever notice a page load increase of of few microseconds. There are way more cost-effective performance improvements available for 99+% of companies out there CPU pinning and IRQ isolation.