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Performance budget
A performance budget is a defined limit, such as a maximum page load time or file size, that a team commits to staying within as they build a product.
Prerequisite: Throughput
What matters
Without an explicit budget, performance tends to quietly degrade over time as new features are added, since no single change feels like the one that broke it.
Example
A team might set a performance budget of 200KB for a page's JavaScript, rejecting or optimizing any change that would push the total over that limit.
Common misconception
A performance budget is not just a nice-to-have goal; treating it as an enforced constraint, not a suggestion, is what actually prevents gradual performance decay.
Recall question
Why does performance tend to degrade gradually without an enforced budget?
Keywords and related concepts
performance budgetweb performanceconstraintslatency