Performance optimization is often treated as a checklist: faster pages, better scores, fewer complaints. In reality, it’s a series of trade‑offs, where every improvement in one area quietly shifts pressure somewhere else.
In this session, Katharina Luger and Ivan Lieckens explore performance in SitecoreAI from a system-wide perspective. Starting with what users actually perceive as “fast,” the talk peels back the layers behind modern cloud architectures to reveal why performance issues are so often misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or optimized in the wrong place.
You’ll see how frontend metrics, rendering strategies, network paths, APIs, and publishing behaviour are tightly connected and how decisions made in one layer can unexpectedly surface as problems in another. Along the way, real-world scenarios illustrate why performance bottlenecks frequently hide outside the application code, and why optimizing for speed is never just a technical exercise.
Rather than offering silver bullets, this talk focuses on building intuition: how to reason about performance, where to look when things slow down, and how to balance user experience, scalability, and operational cost.
If you’ve ever wondered why “making it faster” sometimes makes things worse, or why performance tuning feels like squeezing a water balloon - this session will change how you think about optimization.