Scaling Infrastructure: The Edge, Horizontal Scale, and the Math Behind Them
Application-level fixes (kill the N+1, add the index) get you a long way, but…
Tag
#performance
23 posts
Performance, Measured: Percentiles, Profiling and the Laws That Decide What's Worth Optimizing
The single most expensive habit in performance work is optimizing by gut feel…
Backend Performance: Kill N+1, Add the Index, Cache What's Hot
Ask where a slow backend spends its time and the honest answer is almost always…
AI Application Performance: Stream First, Shrink the Context, Route the Model
LLM applications have two performance budgets that classic backends don’t worry…
Redis — The In-Memory Data-Structure Store, End to End
Redis is one of the most-used pieces of infrastructure in the world — the fast…
Pipelining & Transactions
A single Redis instance does ~100,000 operations per second (Lesson 1) — but…
Go for Backend Engineers — Concurrency, Simplicity and Real Numbers
Most backend languages give you more features every year. Go went the other way…
Performance & Memory
We finish where performance work actually lives: not in clever tricks, but in…
Partitioning & File Layout
Columnar format (Lesson 4) decides how much of each row a query reads; file…
Performance Debugging
“It’s slow” is one of the most common and most slippery problems in production…
How LLM Inference Uses Your Hardware
When people first benchmark an LLM, they’re often confused by a result like this…
Database Internals for Backend Engineers — PostgreSQL in Depth
Most backend engineers use a database every single day, and treat it like a…
Query Patterns That Kill Performance (and How to Fix Them)
After the last few lessons, you know how to read a plan and why the planner…
The Planner and Statistics — Why Postgres Picks Bad Plans
A support team at a logistics company once told me, “The shipment search was…
Reading EXPLAIN Like a Pro — Scans, Joins and Buffers
When I started working with databases, I used to look at output the way most…
Indexes From the Inside — B-trees, Column Order and Special Indexes
An engineer once showed me a table with 23 indexes. The table had 14 columns…
How a Database Stores Your Data — Pages, Tuples and ctid
A few years back, a team I was helping had a reports query that took 40 seconds…
Performance — When and How to Optimize
Performance is the topic every backend engineer wants to talk about on day one…
Redis — Caching, Sessions, Pub/Sub
Redis is an in-memory data structure store that serves as a cache, message…
Performance Optimization and Profiling
A Node.js server that handles 100 requests per second in development might…
Performance Optimization and Profiling in Node.js
Profiling First, Optimize Second Never optimize blindly. Always profile to find…
Node.js Architecture — Event Loop Deep Dive
Why the Event Loop Matters Node.js runs JavaScript on a single thread, yet…
Deep Dive on Caching: From Browser to Database
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and…