How to find and fix performance bottlenecks in your app, database, and infrastructure.
14 articles
Opening a database connection is expensive, and databases cap how many you can have. Connection pooling reuses a bounded set of connections to cut latency and prevent 'too many connections' outages.
Cloud bills creep up quietly until they're a real line item. Here are concrete, founder-friendly tactics to cut spend without re-architecting everything or sacrificing reliability.
Cold starts hurt latency on scale-to-zero and autoscaling workloads. Learn what makes them slow — image size, runtime init, dependency loading — and concrete ways to shrink each phase.
A missing index can turn a 5ms query into a 5-second table scan. This guide explains how indexes work, when to add them, composite index ordering, and how to read query plans.
Caching is the cheapest way to make an app faster and cheaper to run, until invalidation bites you. A practical tour of cache layers, patterns, eviction, and avoiding stampedes.
A product launch or viral moment shouldn't take your app down. Learn how horizontal autoscaling works, how to set metrics and limits, and how to handle the parts that can't scale.
Scale-to-zero saves money but trades it for cold-start latency on the first request. Here's where the time actually goes and the concrete techniques that shrink each phase.
Most cloud waste is structural, not accidental: idle resources, oversized instances, and egress you forgot about. A practical, developer-first playbook for cutting cloud bills without cutting reliability.
Bloated Docker images slow deploys, waste registry storage, and widen your attack surface. Here are the practical techniques that consistently cut image size, from base image choice to multi-stage builds.
Slow Docker builds kill developer feedback loops and inflate CI minutes. Master layer caching, BuildKit cache mounts, and registry-backed caches to turn multi-minute builds into seconds.
Spot and preemptible instances offer the same hardware as on-demand for up to 90% less — if you can handle interruptions. Here is how to use them safely and which workloads are a good fit.
Cold starts are the latency you pay when a scaled-to-zero app spins up to serve a request. This deep dive breaks down every contributing phase and the concrete techniques to shrink each one.
Slow builds tax every commit. This guide covers the highest-leverage techniques to speed up large-app builds: layer caching, cache mounts, dependency hygiene, parallelism, and trimming the build context.
Connection pool exhaustion is one of the most common causes of slowdowns when traffic spikes. Here's what's happening and how to fix it.