Practical Performance

A rapid 10x growth in our customer base was wonderful for our company but caused stress on our systems and engineers. Mongo is on fire! Redis is on fire! The network is saturated! These are but a few of the scalability problems we encountered. Time again, how could we have avoided the pain? Can we embed performance-centric practices in our daily routines? Performance is often a misinterpreted and unloved responsibility of the modern software engineer. Terms like “premature optimisation” can discourage us to consider the performance implications of the software we write. Additionally, many higher-level abstractions and tools we use have a less visible performance cost. I won’t mention time pressure nor agile! In this session, we review performance principles and practices, and how they relate to common (and very real and experienced!) performance issues. I wrap it up by suggesting some simple means to embed performance practices in the daily routine. The hope is to be blissfully unaware that a performance issue has been avoided through good practices!