Performance Optimization Skill

Apply these principles when optimizing code for performance. Focus on the critical 3% where performance truly matters - a 12% improvement is never marginal in engineering.

Core Philosophy

1. Measure First: Never optimize without profiling data
2. Estimate Costs: Back-of-envelope calculations before implementation
3. Avoid Work: The fastest code is code that doesn't run
4. Reduce Allocations: Memory allocation is often the hidden bottleneck
5. Cache Locality: Memory access patterns dominate modern performance

Reference Latency Numbers

Use these for back-of-envelope calculations: