Dong Xiao, product manager at Ashley Laurent, writes:

“How to not mess things up is the message of this article. In many cases it is not what you do that matters in achieving high performance, it is what you do NOT do. Here are half a dozen pitfalls to avoid that may just save you a bundle of time, and make you a hero.

• Don’t overlook performance designs of target hardware platform and operating system.
• Avoid context switching
• Fine-tune task priority
• Don’t do buffer copies (unless you have to)
• Spare dynamic memory allocation/free
• Minimize data path processing
• Profiling to the end

Network Systems DesignLine | Avoid pitfalls and boost performance at all network stack layers