This chapter covers
- Explaining the concept of mechanical sympathy and applying it to low levels such as CPU caches
- Understanding the core differences between heap and stack and how to reduce allocations
- Using standard Go diagnostics tooling
- Delving into how the Garbage Collector (GC) works
- Discussing the impacts of running Go inside of Docker and Kubernetes
Before delving into this chapter, one disclaimer; in most contexts, writing readable and clear code is better than an optimized but more complex code to understand. Indeed, optimization comes generally with a price, and we advocate the reader to follow this famous quote from Wes Dyer:
| Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast, in that order. |
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| -- Wes Dyer | ||
That being said, it doesn’t necessarily mean that optimizing an application for speed and efficiency is necessarily something to prohibit. For example, we can try to identify code paths that need to be optimized because there’s a need for it such as making our customers happy or reducing our costs for example. Throughout this chapter, we will discuss common optimization techniques; some of them will be specific to Go, and some won’t. Furthermore, we will also discuss methods to identify the bottlenecks so that we don’t work blindly.
Mechanical sympathy is a term coined by Jackie Steward, a three-time F1 world champion: