Performance optimization: how do I go about it? by Kasia Zien

How do I know if my program will perform well in production? What does it mean to “perform well”? How much memory will it need? How much traffic can it serve? Are there any memory leaks or race conditions? What part of processing takes up most of the time? Can I optimise it? Every developer should be able to answer those questions about their code. But most of us don’t bother. Why? Because analysing performance is hard and as a result it is often skipped in the development process or ignored until things ge