Performance Optimization
Layer 2: Design Choices
Core Question
What's the bottleneck, and is optimization worth it?
Before optimizing:
- Have you measured? (Don't guess)
- What's the acceptable performance?
- Will optimization add complexity?
Performance Decision → Implementation
Thinking Prompt
Before optimizing:
-
Have you measured?
- Profile first → flamegraph, perf
- Benchmark → criterion, cargo bench
- Identify actual hotspots
-
What's the priority?
- Algorithm (10x-1000x improvement)
- Data structure (2x-10x)
- Allocation (2x-5x)
- Cache (1.5x-3x)
-
What's the trade-off?
- Complexity vs speed
- Memory vs CPU
- Latency vs throughput
Trace Up ↑
To domain constraints (Layer 3):
Trace Down ↓
To implementation (Layer 1):


