Performance engineering requires precision — both in code and language. Profile the application, identify the bottleneck, and reduce latency are the collocations that distinguish professional performance engineers. These exercises train you to describe performance work with technical accuracy.
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Before optimising anything, the engineer decided to ___ under realistic load conditions.
Profile the application is the standard performance engineering collocation. 'Profiling' is the specific technique of measuring where an application spends time and memory. Tools like py-spy, pprof, and Java Flight Recorder are 'profilers' — and you 'profile' an application with them.
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The flame graph made it easy to ___ in the serialisation layer causing the slowdown.
Identify the bottleneck is the professional performance engineering collocation. 'Identify' implies a systematic discovery process — appropriate for profiling and analysis work. 'Find' and 'locate' are informal; 'identify' is the standard in performance reports and postmortems.
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The team's next goal was to ___ to reduce p99 latency from 800ms to under 200ms.
Optimise the critical path is the standard performance and project management collocation. The 'critical path' — the sequence of operations determining minimum execution time — is something you optimise. This is the correct technical collocation in performance engineering and scheduling contexts.
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The load test was designed to ___ of the API under 10,000 concurrent users.
Measure throughput is the standard performance testing collocation. Throughput — the number of requests or transactions processed per unit time — is a quantitative metric that you measure. 'Measure' is the precise verb for obtaining numeric performance metrics.
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The database team switched to connection pooling to ___ experienced by end users.
Reduce latency is the canonical performance optimisation collocation. 'Reduce latency' appears consistently in performance engineering literature, SLO definitions, and system design documentation. 'Minimise' is aspirational; 'lower' and 'decrease' are acceptable but 'reduce' is the standard professional choice.