3x Performance: A Humbling Journey

When I was asked to fix a core component’s performance on mobile, the numbers were bad—load times were hitting 4 seconds. Looking at the traces, it seemed like a chain of slow API calls. As a Frontend Engineer, I initially assumed the problem was on the backend and out of my hands.

I was wrong.

This talk covers the four-month investigation that followed. I’ll share how we debugged a complex performance bottleneck in a large-scale Adobe application. It turned out the solution wasn’t just about code, but about understanding the infrastructure between the client and the server.

We will look at how tweaking “boring” mechanics like CORS headers and connection handshakes resulted in massive speed gains, and how we caught our analytics data hiding failures in specific regions. We eventually made the feature 3x faster, but the real takeaway is on how to debug across the entire stack, not just the browser.