Perf Sanity

perf-sanity

Not optimisation. Weak perf-sanity looks like: the code passes tests on a 10-row fixture, so it ships — and dies at 100k rows in prod. Strong perf-sanity names the realistic size of every input the diff iterates and refuses to ship the five classics against an unbounded one.

The five classics

1. Nested iteration over the same collection — for x in items: if y in items, or .find()/.includes()/in list inside a loop over the same data — is O(n²): fine at 100 items, dead at 100k. Build a set/map once and look up.
2. Query-in-a-loop is the N+1. A DB/API/RPC call inside for row in rows turns one round-trip into a thousand. Batch it: WHERE id IN (...), a join, the bulk endpoint, a prefetch. Same for file opens, subprocess spawns, and per-item logging to a slow sink.
3. Loading the whole thing to use a piece: reading a full file for its first line, fetching all rows to count them, deserialising a payload to check one field. Stream, LIMIT, or push the filter/aggregate down to the source.
4. Sync blocking in async/hot paths: a synchronous HTTP call, file read, or sleep inside an async handler stalls the event loop for every caller. Use the async client or move it off-path.
5. Unbounded growth: caches without eviction, module-level lists appended per request, listeners registered but never removed, unbounded queues. Anything that grows with traffic needs a bound or an eviction rule.

The check (before reporting done)

1. Bound inventory. For every loop, comprehension, map/filter/reduce, and recursive walk the diff adds, write down what it iterates and its realistic maximum: the source (user data, DB table, API page, log file, config) and a number. If you don't know the number, measure it — SELECT COUNT(*), wc -l, the API's page size × page count — don't guess. Config lists and enum tables are bounded; anything a user or the system can grow is not.
2. Loop-body scan. For each loop over an unbounded input, list every I/O call, nested search, and fresh large allocation in its body. Each one is batched/hoisted or explicitly justified in the report.
3. Growth scan. For every new cache, list, map, queue, or listener that outlives a request, name what bounds it.
4. Run it once at realistic size when that is cheap (a generated fixture, a prod-sized dev table). Tiny-fixture tests don't catch complexity-class bugs; they hide them.

Calibration

The bar is "no complexity-class surprises on realistic input sizes" — not micro-optimisation. A readable O(n) beats a clever O(n log n); a loop over a 20-entry config list needs no fix, and rewriting bounded code for hypothetical scale is scope creep. When you fix a classic, keep the diff minimal and behaviour identical: same ordering, same handling of duplicates, same error on a missing key.

Report

State the input-size assumption: "safe up to ~N items because X is bounded by Y; the previous version was O(n²) in Z." If a classic remains because fixing it is out of scope, flag it with the input size it fails at rather than shipping it silently.