Imagine you're hosting a party and want everything to run smoothly: the food should be ready on time, the music should never stop, and there should be no long lines at the game stations. In the world of system design, this is akin to performance optimization—ensuring that your system runs as efficiently as possible, providing a seamless experience for the users, no matter how many of them are accessing it simultaneously. Let's dive into the key strategies for optimizing the performance of a system.