Understanding Design Ceilings Beat Micro-Optimizations

1 a2g 1 8/11/2025, 7:36:23 PM alexsanderhamir.medium.com ↗

Comments (1)

a2g · 3h ago
I recently wrote about a subtle but critical lesson from optimizing a Go sharded pool: sometimes making a hot function faster doesn’t improve overall performance because you hit the system’s architectural ceiling.

In my Medium post, I share profiling insights and explain why the design—not just micro-optimizations—determines what’s possible. I show how a slower but smarter load distribution method cut latency from ~10ns to ~3ns by better leveraging cache locality and reducing contention.

Would love to hear others’ experiences hitting design limits!