Performance Impact and Optimization

Performance Impact and Optimization

Runtime security controls inevitably impact performance. Each security layer adds processing overhead, potentially affecting application latency and throughput. Understanding performance implications helps architects balance security requirements with performance needs. Careful optimization can minimize overhead while maintaining security effectiveness.

Seccomp profile optimization represents a key performance consideration. Default profiles include hundreds of rules, each evaluated on system calls. Custom profiles tailored to specific applications reduce rule count and evaluation overhead. Profile development requires thorough application testing to identify required system calls. Tools like strace help identify system call patterns for profile optimization.

Security monitoring overhead varies significantly by implementation. eBPF-based monitoring provides efficient kernel-level event collection with minimal overhead. User-space monitoring tools may introduce higher latencies. Sampling strategies can reduce overhead by monitoring subset of events. However, sampling may miss security-relevant events, requiring careful threshold configuration.