Performance Budgets¶

Define acceptable latency, throughput, memory, and determinism limits.

Canonical interpretation¶

A budget turns performance from vague preference into a verifiable requirement.

Purpose¶

Define acceptable latency, throughput, memory, and determinism limits.

Apply when¶

Measured behavior violates a budget or known scale constraint.
Memory, latency, throughput, or determinism is a first-class requirement.

This does not mean¶

Do not choose arbitrary numbers without user or operational relevance.
Do not optimize every component equally when only end-to-end budgets matter.

Trade-offs¶

Optimization usually increases complexity and narrows implementation freedom.
Benchmarks can mislead when they do not represent production workloads.

Conflicts with canonical entries¶

None recorded.

Broader policy tensions¶

clarity
portability

Reinforces canonical entries¶

measure-dont-guess

Supports broader concerns¶

None recorded.

Core Skill ownership¶

Primary owner: performance-and-resources

Positive example¶

Set a p95 response and memory ceiling for a worker and test against it.

Counterexample¶

Call a system “fast” without a workload or target.

Guidance for AI models¶

Apply this guidance only after considering the active project profile, constraints, and architecture authority.
State the concrete design consequence instead of citing the principle name as sufficient justification.

Editorial note¶

This page is generated from the canonical YAML entry. Edit principles/entries/performance-budgeting.yaml and regenerate the compendium instead of editing this file directly.