Container Performance Optimisation

A container that works is not the same as a container that performs. Bloated images slow every pull and deploy, inefficient builds waste minutes on every CI run, oversized or undersized resource allocations cost money or cause failures, and slow startup hurts autoscaling and recovery. Performance optimisation is about making containers small, fast to build, fast to start, and efficient at runtime — and doing it with measurement, not guesswork. The biggest wins usually come from a few high-leverage changes: shrinking the image, ordering the Dockerfile for cache efficiency, right-sizing resources from real data, and speeding startup. Crucially, optimisation must be driven by profiling, because intuition about where time and bytes go is frequently wrong. This lesson consolidates the techniques that turn a functional container into an efficient, production-grade one.