> Saving a small fraction of a second millions of times over, or a handful of cycles a trillion times over, is so much more impactful than saving a dozen seconds per hour-long recording.

At a large-enough scale, all savings are significant.

> Also your link doesn't explain what they changed?

They changed a function signature to use an output argument instead of a return value. i don't recall the exact signature, but it was conceptually like:

    v8::Value foo(...);

to

    void foo(..., v8::Value &result);

Why? Because their measurements showed a microscopic per-call savings for the latter construct.

PS: i wasn't aware that source code for this codec is not available. That of course puts a damper on it.

> At a large-enough scale, all savings are significant.

Yes, but not every tradeoff between compression speed and compression ratio is something that makes sense to scale in the first place.