performance-investigation

performance-investigation is a skill for Claude Code from brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator. It costs 163 tokens per session (1,793 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A measurement-first process for finding and fixing software performance problems, such as slow responses, high memory use, CPU spikes, or reduced throughput. It requires a baseline before changes and new measurements after each fix.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate slow endpoints, rendering, builds, memory use, or processing under defined workloads, then compare results after optimization.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork by showing which part is actually slow and whether a change improved the measured result.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the superpowers-orchestrator plugin — 28 skills, 2 agents, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate slow endpoints, rendering, builds, memory use, or processing under defined workloads, then compare results after optimization.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator/performance-investigation
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator --skill performance-investigation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install superpowers-orchestrator, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 2 agents, 6 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for performance-investigation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator/performance-investigation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator/performance-investigation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator/performance-investigation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator/performance-investigation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for performance-investigation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator/performance-investigation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator/performance-investigation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 163 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,793 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00163 $0.01793
Opus 5 $0.00081 $0.00897
Sonnet 5 $0.00033 $0.00359
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00179

Measured 10d ago against content hash ba25aadee547, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

performance-investigation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/performance-investigation/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Performance Investigation

Measure first. Guess never. Fix once.

Why This Exists

Performance intuition is wrong more often than it's right. Developers consistently misidentify bottlenecks — optimizing the wrong function, caching the wrong query, parallelizing the wrong loop. This skill enforces a measurement-first approach that ensures you fix what's actually slow, not what feels slow.

Phase 1: Baseline

Before changing anything, establish a quantitative baseline.

  1. Define the metric. What specifically is slow? Be precise:

    • Response time for endpoint X under Y concurrent users
    • Time to render component Z with N items
    • Memory usage after processing M records
    • Build time for the full project

    "It's slow" is not a metric. "GET /api/users takes 1200ms p95 with 100 concurrent connections" is.

  2. Measure the current state. Run the measurement 3+ times to confirm it's stable and reproducible. For long-running measurements (>2 min each), 2 runs within 5% of each other is sufficient. Record:

    • The metric value (with units)
    • The measurement method (tool, command, conditions)
    • The environment (machine, load, data size)
  3. Set a target (if the user hasn't). What would "fast enough" look like? This prevents infinite optimization — you stop when the target is met, not when you run out of ideas.

Baseline: GET /api/users → 1200ms p95 (100 concurrent, 10k users in DB)
Target: < 300ms p95
Method: wrk -t4 -c100 -d30s http://localhost:3000/api/users

Phase 2: Profile

Identify the actual bottleneck — not the guessed one.

  1. Choose the right profiling tool for the stack. Prefer CLI-based tools that produce text output (Claude can read and analyze these directly). For GUI-only tools, ask the user to run them and share the output.
    • Node.js: node --prof + node --prof-process (text output), clinic doctor --autocannon (generates HTML — ask user to share), 0x (flamegraph — ask user to describe hotspots)
    • Python: python -m cProfile -s cumulative script.py (text output), py-spy top --pid PID (text output)
    • Go: go test -bench . -cpuprofile cpu.prof + go tool pprof -text cpu.prof (text output)
    • Browser: Ask the user to run Lighthouse CLI (npx lighthouse URL --output json) or share DevTools Performance tab screenshots
    • Database: EXPLAIN ANALYZE (text output — run directly), slow query log
    • General: time command, perf stat command (text output)

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 125 lines · 163 tokens per session scan A ba25aadee547

Subscribe to this mod's changes

performance-investigation is a skill published in the GitHub repository brunob54/superpowers-orchestrator (3 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 163 tokens to every session and 1,793 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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