Why your tests are slow
Six causes, ranked by how often they are the real problem, and the fix for each.
#performance
17 pieces tagged performance,
from April 7, 2025 to September 16, 2026.
The queues you did not know you had
Every fixed-size resource is a queue. Most of them are unmonitored, and that is where latency hides.
Reading a flame graph
The single most useful performance visualisation, and the four shapes worth recognising in one.
The performance budget
A number, agreed in advance, that fails the build. The only mechanism that has ever kept a system fast.
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.