Meta rules that are often ignored: 1. Establish what is good enough 2. Measure, don't guess 3. Fix the biggest bottleneck first 4. Measure after fixing And

Meta rules that are often ignored: 1. Establish what is good enough 2. Measure, don't guess 3. Fix the biggest bottleneck first 4. Measure after fixing And some general things: 5. Avoid micro-benchmarks (i.e. things not at the entire system level) 6. Be careful with synthetic data 7. Know your general estimates (e.g. cache, memory, disk, network speeds)