The performance budget
A number, agreed in advance, that fails the build. The only mechanism that has ever kept a system fast.
#performance
14 pieces tagged performance,
from April 7, 2025 to July 27, 2026.
Connection pooling, explained properly
Why your database has 400 connections, why that is bad, and how to size a pool without guessing.
Why your container image is 1.4 gigabytes
It should be forty megabytes. Here is where the rest of it came from and how to get it back.
Compression is underrated
The cheapest performance win available, ignored because it is not glamorous. Where it pays and which algorithm to pick.
Why your build is slow
Six causes, in order of how often they're the actual problem, with the fix for each.
GDC and the engineering nobody outside games learns from
Frame budgets, determinism, and shipping to a fixed target. Game developers solved problems the rest of us are still arguing about.
How to read a benchmark
A short guide to the specific ways performance numbers lie, from someone who has published misleading ones.
Postgres 18's async I/O, four months in
The biggest storage-layer change in years is in production now. Here's what it actually did to real workloads.
Rust 1.90 and the linker nobody talks about
LLD becomes the default linker on x86-64 Linux. Link times drop and nobody notices, which is the point.
Caching is the only optimization that reliably works
A hierarchy of caches, the two hard problems, and why your p99 is bad in a way profiling won't show you.
Rust 1.89 and the long tail of const generics
Inferred array lengths in const generic position, plus x86 SIMD stabilizations that matter for anyone doing math.
Grok 4 and the benchmark that ate the discourse
xAI claims frontier results with heavy test-time compute. The number that matters is the one nobody quotes.