Performance
Most performance work is about what the machine actually has to do. These posts are benchmark-backed war stories across Go, C++, distributed systems, and the web. They cover finding a bottleneck with a profiler, picking a data structure by how it uses memory, and measuring before and after every change.
Start with the pprof walkthrough for the methodology, then follow whichever rabbit hole interests you.
| Date | Title | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Making a Log Viewer 12× Faster: A Go Optimization Guide A hands-on Go pprof tutorial: every command, every output, and every line of annotated source code from optimizing a real terminal log viewer. | 19 min | |
| Why You Should Never Use a set std::unordered_set looks like O(1), but in hot C++ loops the memory access pattern can dominate. Here is a duplicate-filtering benchmark with dense ids, sparse ids, Boost dynamic_bitset, sort+unique, and the case where unordered_set wins. | 5 min | |
| The Shape of Duplicate Detection Duplicate detection looks like a solved problem: use a hash set. A benchmark suite of 4050 measurements across finite batches and streaming workloads shows the fastest strategy can be 148x faster than a hash set, or 90,000x slower, depending on what you are deduplicating and what guarantees you need. | 16 min | |
| How a Minor Release Caused a 10x Throughput Drop in Kafka Diagnose a Kafka throughput drop after v3.9.0. Learn why min.insync.replicas slows consumers and how to fix performance safely. | 4 min | |
| Optimizing My Hugo Blog: Journey to Zero JS I recently looked into my blog’s performance and was surprised to find my pages were downloading over 3.6 MB of JavaScript and render-blocking CSS on every load. Here is the step-by-step breakdown of how I reduced my payload and removed JavaScript. | 3 min |