Bottlenecks

Demystifying Computer Hardware for Software Engineers Software engineers focus on code, APIs, and systems design. Understanding hardware helps you write faster, more reliable software and choose better tools. A practical view of CPU, memory, storage, and input/output makes the link between code and performance clearer. Understanding the Core Components The CPU is the brain. It brings instructions to life and uses caches to store hot data. More cores help parallel tasks, but software must be designed to run in parallel. RAM stores data for active programs; its speed and size affect how well you can work with big data sets. Storage is slower, yet non-volatile; SSDs (especially NVMe) speed up startup and data access compared with HDDs. ...

Database design and performance tuning Good database design matters more for long-term performance than fancy queries. When you start from how data will be accessed, you can avoid common bottlenecks. A clear data model helps every later step, from writing queries to scaling the system. In practice, ask how data will be read and updated, and let those patterns guide decisions. Start with the data model and constraints. Normalize to reduce duplication and anomalies, and add primary keys and foreign keys to keep relations sound. Decide between natural keys or surrogate keys based on stability and access needs. Plan for growth with partitioning, archiving, or sharding so hot data stays fast to query and old data can be kept without slowing down writes. ...