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Arvid Norberg on the libtorrent blog has put together an excellent list of principles of high performance programs, obviously derived from hard won experience programming on bittorrent:

Two fundamental causes of performance problems:

  1. Memory Latency. A big performance problem on modern computers is the latency of SDRAM. The CPU waits idle for a read from memory to come back.
  2. Context Switching. When a CPU switches context "the memory it will access is most likely unrelated to the memory the previous context was accessing. This often results in significant eviction of the previous cache, and requires the switched-to context to load much of its data from RAM, which is slow."

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