Developer Onboarding
Advanced

Performance Optimization

Real case studies of using AI to optimize performance, with before/after metrics from actual client projects

Real Case: Client A Report Optimization

Initial state:

  • Complex financial report
  • 180+ seconds to generate
  • Frequent timeouts
  • User complaints piling up

Approach

Step 1: Profile

You: "Help me add performance logging to @ReportService.ts:
- Time each major operation
- Log database query times
- Log data processing times
- Output structured JSON"

Step 2: Analyze with AI

You: "Here's profiling output from production:
[paste logs]

Identify bottlenecks."

AI:
"Main issues:
1. N+1 query loading related data (85% of time)
2. Processing all records in memory (12% of time)
3. Complex aggregations in application code (3% of time)"

Step 3: Optimize iteratively

Iteration 1: "Fix N+1 queries with proper joins"
Result: 180s → 45s

Iteration 2: "Stream process large datasets instead of loading all"
Result: 45s → 20s

Iteration 3: "Move aggregations to database"
Result: 20s → 8s

Iteration 4: "Add Redis caching for frequent reports"
Result: 8s → 5s (cached)

Final Result

  • 180s → 5-20s (depending on cache)
  • Zero timeouts
  • Happy users
  • Client showcase case

Key insight: AI excellent at identifying patterns from profiling data. Suggests optimizations you might miss.