Authors:
Rukmini Subramanian Iyer, Cloud Software Engineer, Intel
Julia Sukharina, Cloud Engineering Manager, Intel
Ready to unlock the true performance of your data center workloads? Imagine having the latest optimization techniques, direct from Intel’s experts and the community, just a click away, no more hunting through forums or scattered docs. Dive in today to discover proven solutions to common workloads and challenges, share your expertise, and see measurable boosts in your applications. Your next breakthrough in performance might be just one recipe away. Are you ready to discover it?
Why We Built It
At Intel, performance optimization is not just a feature; it’s part of our DNA. Over the years, we’ve created an incredible amount of tuning knowledge across teams, architectures, workloads, and customer engagements. The challenge has always been: how do we make this knowledge easy to find, easy to use, and easy to evolve?
That’s exactly why we created Optimization Zone.
Optimization Zone was born directly from our customer engagements and feedback. Many recurring topics raised during our customer engagements, such as Kafka, Spark, Hardware PMUs, Software scaling principles, and Scalable Vector Search (SVS), are now part of the repository.
By moving our optimization knowledge to GitHub:
- Every change is transparent and versioned
- Updates are easy to track and review
- Content becomes far more accessible and discoverable
The result is a system that scales with our technology, our customers, and our teams.
Optimization Zone is a public, open-source GitHub repository that serves as a central home for data center workload and software optimizations on Intel hardware.
The repository hosts a growing collection of:
- Intel tuning guides
- Optimization recipes and best-known methods (BKMs) for software, workloads and hardware
- Performance analysis and monitoring guidance
- Optimal Hardware configuration recommendations
All content is designed to be developer-friendly, whether you’re optimizing a real customer workload or exploring best practices on the latest Intel platforms.
Discover optimization recipes for leading workloads—including Cassandra, Spark, Java, HPC, Kafka, and more—already available in the repository. Dive in today to discover best known methods for your workloads and begin realizing measurable performance gains in your environment.
In Q1’26, following new recipes were added:
- Apache Kafka: best-known practices to optimize performance on Intel® Xeon® CPUs.
- Vector similarity search on Redis: best practices for optimizing vector similarity search performance in Redis on Intel® Xeon® processors.
- Analytics proof points: TPC-DS gen-over-gen results for Spark and Gluten on Google Cloud.
- Scaling principles: Basic software scaling principles on large multi-core servers.
- Performance tools guidance: Intel Tools reference with practical tips on choosing the right monitoring and profiling tools for various scenarios.
- HPC on Intel® Xeon® 6 with P-Cores: tuning & configuration guidance for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications on Intel® Xeon® 6 with P-Cores.
How Contributions Work
Contributing recipes to Optimization Zone is straightforward and familiar to anyone who’s used GitHub.
- Contributions are made via pull requests
- Each PR requires two reviews by maintainers before merging
- Contributions should be in GitHub Markdown format
- Check out the Contributing section of the repo and open a pull request
Try one recipe that matches your workload this week and let us know what worked (or didn’t). Your feedback helps us prioritize what to publish next.
Open a GitHub issue with your environment and target metrics so we can turn it into the next recipe.
Visit the repository and explore what’s already there.
You can:
- Submit issues or ask questions
- Request new optimization recipes
- Test recipes and provide feedback
- Provide direct feedback on what matters most to you
Together, this creates a continuous feedback loop of the real-world challenges you face.
Explore, contribute, and request: Optimization Zone is where Intel performance knowledge stays current—and where your next optimization starts.
Notices and Disclaimers
Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.
Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates. See backup for configuration details. No product or component can be absolutely secure.
Your costs and results may vary.
Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software, or service activation.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.