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ui-tracker/skills/software/performance-optimization.md
2026-03-27 22:34:12 -05:00

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Performance Optimization

Purpose

Improve responsiveness and efficiency by focusing on the bottlenecks that matter most to users, systems, or operating cost.

When to use

  • Investigating slow pages, endpoints, jobs, or queries
  • Reducing memory, CPU, network, or rendering overhead
  • Preventing regressions in critical paths
  • Prioritizing optimization work with limited time

Inputs to gather

  • Performance symptoms, target metrics, and critical user or system paths
  • Existing measurements, profiles, logs, traces, or benchmarks
  • Current architecture and known hot spots
  • Acceptable tradeoffs in complexity, cost, and feature scope

How to work

  • Measure or inspect evidence before optimizing.
  • Focus on the dominant bottleneck rather than broad cleanup.
  • Prefer changes that improve the critical path without making the system harder to maintain.
  • Re-measure after changes when possible.
  • Capture the conditions under which the optimization matters so future work does not cargo-cult it.

Output expectations

  • Bottleneck diagnosis and recommended or implemented improvement
  • Before-and-after evidence when available
  • Notes on tradeoffs, limits, and remaining hot spots

Quality checklist

  • Optimization targets a real bottleneck.
  • Claimed gains are grounded in evidence, not assumption alone.
  • Complexity added by the optimization is justified.
  • Regression risk is considered for correctness and maintainability.

Handoff notes

  • Note whether the result is measured, estimated, or hypothesis-driven.
  • Pair with observability and operability when instrumentation is weak.