[joshka]

Meta rules that are often ignored:

1. Establish what is good enough

2. Measure, don't guess

3. Fix the biggest bottleneck first

4. Measure after fixing

And some general things:

5. Avoid micro-benchmarks (i.e. things not at the entire system level)

6. Be careful with synthetic data

7. Know your general estimates (e.g. cache, memory, disk, network speeds)