Optimization Strategies

Introduction

A condensed, repeatable optimisation playbook used at Netflix, Stripe and Shopify.

Understanding the topic

• 📏 Measure first; never optimise without data.
• 🚧 Eliminate N+1 and other accidental DB chatter.
• 🧊 Cache aggressively — and invalidate carefully.
• 📚 Read replicas + materialised views for reporting.
• 📨 Push slow work to queues; respond fast to the user.
• 🪶 Slim payloads — projections, sparse fieldsets, gzip.
• 🧵 Java 21 virtual threads for I/O fan-out.
• 🌍 CDN for cacheable responses at the edge.