# Performance Optimization & Profiling

**Track:** Craft & Production — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** cross-framework
**Level:** Hard
**Prerequisites:** GPU Instancing at Scale, Particle Systems

**In one line:** Draw-call batching, frame budget, workers, GPU profiling.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Real-time generative work lives inside a frame budget: sixty frames per second leaves about 16.7 milliseconds to compute and draw, and exceeding it stutters. Optimization means measuring before cutting—profiling with the browser's own tools to find the true cost—then batching draw calls, minimizing state changes, offloading heavy computation to Web Workers, and pushing parallel math to the GPU via shaders. The discipline is borrowed from games and demoscene culture, where constraint breeds invention. Aesthetically it widens the possible: smoother interaction, denser particle counts, larger spaces explored live. Performance is not separate from the art here—it sets the ceiling on what the work can attempt.