PickVidsBest Software performance & optimization Videos
The 123 Software performance & optimization videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 1 introductory, 56 intermediate, 10 for a general viewer, and 56 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a talk. What they share is that one speaker finishes a claim, and the examples exist to hold that claim up. Channels you will keep seeing include CppCon, Molly Rocket, Strange Loop Conference.
How Python was Shaped by leaky Internals, Armin Ronacher, Flask framework
Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, explains how CPython's internals and C API leak into the language's semantics.
CppCon 2015: Andrei Alexandrescu “std::allocator...”
Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk argues that std::allocator is badly designed.
Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
A DevGAMM talk by Jonathan Blow arguing that civilizations can lose technological capability and that software quality is already deteriorating.
"Performance Matters" by Emery Berger
Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects.
The Thirty Million Line Problem
Casey Muratori's long talk arguing that modern software has ballooned to tens of millions of lines because of hardware and OS diversity.
CppCon 2017: Matt Kulukundis “Designing a Fast, Efficient, Cache-friendly Hash Table, Step by Step”
Matt Kulukundis explains how Google designed SwissTable, a fast, cache-friendly hash table, step by step from std::unordered_map.
Erlang Factory 2014 - That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp
Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team.
How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica
In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation.
"How NOT to Measure Latency" by Gil Tene
Gil Tene of Azul Systems explains common pitfalls in measuring latency and response time, including why averages mislead and the problem of coordinated omission.
Refterm Lecture Part 1 - Philosophies of Optimization
Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work.
CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"
Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development.
Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only)
Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.
Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025
Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about.
CppCon 2014: Chandler Carruth "Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures"
Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2014 talk on writing fast C++, explaining why data structure choice and memory layout matter more than clever algorithms.
[EPILEPSY WARNING] How fast should an unoptimized terminal run?
Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal.
FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance)
Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware.
Simple Code, High Performance
Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second.
CppCon 2019: Chandler Carruth “There Are No Zero-cost Abstractions”
Chandler Carruth argues in a CppCon 2019 talk that C++ has no truly zero-cost abstractions.
C++ and Beyond 2012: Herb Sutter - atomic Weapons 1 of 2
Herb Sutter's deep C++ and Beyond 2012 talk on atomics and the C++ memory model, covering why programmers chasing top performance need to understand hardware ordering.
Sorting Algorithms: Speed Is Found In The Minds of People - Andrei Alexandrescu - CppCon 2019
Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.
Jake Archibald on the web browser event loop, setTimeout, micro tasks, requestAnimationFrame, ...
Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript.
Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: A Lock-Free Hash Table
A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Cliff Click of Azul Systems presents a lock-free concurrent hash table that scales to 768 CPUs.
CppCon 2017: Carl Cook “When a Microsecond Is an Eternity: High Performance Trading Systems in C++”
Optiver's Carl Cook explains how to build high-frequency trading systems in C++, where the critical path runs rarely but must be extremely fast.
"Outperforming Imperative with Pure Functional Languages" by Richard Feldman
Richard Feldman explains how pure functional languages can match or beat imperative ones on performance.