#performance

Start a command with a higher niceness so it yields CPU time to your interactive programs.

Rank running processes by CPU time using Get-Process and Sort-Object.

Measure and compare the runtime of shell commands with statistics.

The forgotten robocopy switch that parallelizes file copies — a big win when copying many small files.

Set the system power profile (performance, balanced, power-saver) from the terminal via power-profiles-daemon.

Unlock Windows' hidden Ultimate Performance power plan with powercfg -duplicatescheme for maximum responsiveness in games and heavy workloads.

systemd-analyze blame ranks every unit by the time it took to initialize, revealing what delays startup.

iostat -x prints extended per-device statistics — r/s, w/s, await, and %util — refreshed on an interval so you can watch saturation.

When a program hangs or hits a mysterious error, `strace -p PID` shows the exact syscalls it makes right now — the debugging tool people know but whose flags they forget.

Capture a stack-sample report of an unresponsive macOS app using the built-in sample command.

Restrict a noisy or performance-critical process to chosen cores with CPU affinity.

Create a compressed RAM-backed swap device so the system handles memory pressure without hitting slow disk swap.