Reliability & Performance
Performance Engineering
Measure, identify, and eliminate the bottlenecks that slow platforms down.
Learning objectives
- Measure performance with profiling tools
- Apply caching at the right layers
- Optimize data access for hot paths
Measure before you optimize
Guesswork wastes effort. Profile requests to find the real bottlenecks - often a slow data lookup or an inefficient process rather than the code you expect.
Caching layers
- Browser cache: tells clients to reuse assets.
- Application cache: stores expensive computations or lookups.
- CDN: serves static content from edge locations.
Data access hot spots
Design indexes and lookups around the access patterns that matter most, fetch only the data you need, and keep large result sets paginated. A single missing index can turn a milliseconds response into a multi-second one.
Key takeaways
- Always profile before optimizing.
- Cache at multiple layers, not just one.
- Data design is the usual culprit behind slow pages.