Go Performance

Go Performance

Performance work in Go follows one rule: measure first. Intuition about bottlenecks is wrong roughly 80% of the time. Profile, hypothesise, change one thing, re-measure. The patterns in this skill apply only on hot paths — premature optimisation makes code worse without making it faster.

Core Rules

1. Profile before optimising. go test -bench, pprof, fgprof — never guess.
2. One change at a time. Multi-change "optimisation" passes are unreviewable.
3. Compare with benchstat. Single runs lie; you need ≥6 runs to see signal.
4. Allocation reduction usually beats CPU micro-optimisation — the GC is fast but not free.
5. Rule out external bottlenecks first. If 90% of latency is the DB, faster Go code is irrelevant.
6. Document optimisations in comments. Future readers will revert "ugly" code without context.

Iterative Methodology

The cycle is: define goal → write benchmark → measure baseline → diagnose → improve one thing → re-measure → commit with the diff.

# baseline
go test -bench=BenchmarkHotPath -benchmem -count=6 ./pkg/... | tee /tmp/report-1.txt

# (apply ONE change)

# compare
go test -bench=BenchmarkHotPath -benchmem -count=6 ./pkg/... | tee /tmp/report-2.txt
benchstat /tmp/report-1.txt /tmp/report-2.txt

If benchstat shows no statistically significant change, the optimisation didn't work — revert it. Keep the /tmp/report-*.txt files as an audit trail; paste the benchstat output in the commit body.

Read references/benchmarking-and-pprof.md for benchmark writing, pprof workflow, and b.Loop() (Go 1.24+).

Rule Out External Bottlenecks First

Before optimising any Go code, check that the bottleneck is actually in your process:

• fgprof — captures on-CPU and off-CPU (I/O wait) time. If off-CPU dominates, the issue is elsewhere.
• Goroutine profile — many goroutines blocked in net.(*conn).Read or database/sql means external I/O is the limit.
• Distributed tracing — span breakdown shows which upstream is slow.

If the bottleneck is external (DB, downstream API, disk), fix that — query tuning, indexes, connection pools, caching. No Go-level change will help.

Decision Tree: Where Is Time Spent?

Read references/allocation-and-memory.md for allocation patterns, sync.Pool, struct alignment, and escape analysis.

Concrete High-ROI Patterns

These are the small changes that consistently show up in profiles. Apply them when the symptom matches — not preemptively.

1. strconv over fmt for primitives

// Bad — fmt parses a format string
s := fmt.Sprint(n)

// Good — direct conversion, ~2x faster, half the allocations
s := strconv.Itoa(n)

2. Move constant []byte conversions out of loops

// Bad — allocates on every iteration
for i := 0; i < n; i++ {
    w.Write([]byte("hello"))
}

// Good — convert once
hello := []byte("hello")
for i := 0; i < n; i++ {
    w.Write(hello)
}

About 7x faster in a tight loop.

3. Preallocate slice and map capacity

// Bad — repeated growth, O(n) copies per growth
out := []Result{}
for _, x := range input {
    out = append(out, transform(x))
}

// Good — zero reallocations
out := make([]Result, 0, len(input))
for _, x := range input {
    out = append(out, transform(x))
}

Slice capacity is exact: make([]T, 0, n) allocates exactly n slots. Map capacity is a hint about bucket count, but still avoids the worst rehashes.

About 12x faster on the synthetic benchmark.

4. strings.Builder for loop-built strings

s += w in a loop is O(n²). Use strings.Builder, with Grow(n) when the final size is estimable.

5. Pass small fixed-size values

*string, *int, *time.Time add indirection without saving anything — strings and time.Time are already small headers. Use pointers only for mutation, types ~128B+, types embedding sync primitives, or where nil is meaningful.

Read references/concrete-patterns.md for the full pattern catalogue with benchmark numbers.

Anti-Patterns

Verification Checklist

• A benchmark exists for the function being optimised.
• Baseline /tmp/report-1.txt was captured before any change.
• Each change is a single commit with benchstat output in the body.
• benchstat shows the change is statistically significant (p < 0.05).
• Profile (pprof) confirms the targeted hotspot actually moved.
• Optimisations on production paths have an explanatory comment.
• GOMEMLIMIT is configured for any containerised long-running process.

Enforce With Linters

Mechanical anti-patterns belong to CI:

• gocritic — flags fmt.Sprint(x) for primitives, repeated allocations.
• prealloc — slices that could be preallocated.
• gocyclo / funlen — proxies for code that is hard to optimise.
• fieldalignment (go vet) — struct layout for memory reduction.

References

• references/benchmarking-and-pprof.md — writing benchmarks, benchstat, pprof workflow, b.Loop()
• references/allocation-and-memory.md — escape analysis, sync.Pool, struct alignment, backing-array leaks
• references/concrete-patterns.md — full pattern catalogue with numbers