How did you understand that something needed to be optimized? How did you evaluate performance in production?

I started optimization when I noticed that the application was running slowly, response times were increasing, or the load on servers was growing. To assess performance in production, I used monitoring metrics (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) and logs with timing measurements of key operations.

I also applied code profiling using tools like cProfile or Py-Spy to identify bottlenecks. After making changes, I compared metrics before and after to ensure improvement.

An example of simple profiling in Python:

import cProfile

def my_function():
    # code to optimize
    pass

cProfile.run('my_function()')

This approach helps understand where exactly time and resources are spent, and make decisions about optimization.