Why Adding Speed Features Makes Your App Slower (opens in new tab)

Performance work has a cruel irony at its center: the tools you reach for to make an app faster tend to make it slower over time. Not because engineers are bad at their jobs, but because each optimization is also a feature, and features compound. Here’s the specific machinery by which this happens. 1. Caching Adds a Second System That Also Needs to Be Fast Caching is the first thing engineers reach for when an app feels slow, and it works. Fetch something expensive once, store it, serve it fr...