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My application works but it's slower than I'd like. What programming performance tips do you use to identify and fix bottlenecks? I'm looking for both high-level strategies and specific techniques for making code run faster.

For programming performance tips, always measure before and after optimizations. Use a profiler to find actual bottlenecks - they're rarely where you think. Common culprits: unnecessary allocations in loops, repeated calculations, I/O operations, and network calls. Also, learn about algorithmic complexity - sometimes the best optimization is choosing a better algorithm.

Cache aggressively but intelligently. Memoization can turn O(n²) into O(n), but only cache things that are expensive to compute and frequently used. Also, consider lazy evaluation - don't compute things until you need them. And batch operations - instead of processing items one by one with overhead each time, process in batches.

Understand your hardware. Modern CPUs have multiple cores, caches, and SIMD instructions. Writing cache-friendly code (sequential memory access, proper data alignment) can be more important than algorithmic improvements. Also, consider parallelism - but only if the problem is actually parallelizable and the overhead doesn't outweigh the benefits.