Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mmccaff 4149 days ago
It's a bit unique to each situation, but a few topics that come to mind immediately:

* Profile & measure to narrow down where time is being spent

* Memoize repeated function calls

* Cache data that doesn't frequently change

* Minify web assets

* Gzip compress web output (a la mod_deflate)

* Load balance

* Shard

* Strategic database indexing

* Asynchronous workers when beneficial

* Use the correct data structures

* Minimize Disk I/O

^ I suppose the last few are architecture-related more so than code.

These topics are mostly specific to web, but, here is a "curated list of Web Performance Optimization"

https://github.com/davidsonfellipe/awesome-wpo

Since nobody has quoted Donald Knuth yet (and this quote sometimes gets bent to fit situations that it shouldn't):

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"