Application development has become much easier because of the availability of frameworks and application platforms. Developing scalable and highly performing applications is a major challenge in modern application development. Especially highly distributed SOA architectures and always larger systems make this task more and more challenging. The saying “Make it work first and make it fast later” is no longer valild. More and more scalability and performance problem cause software projects to fail or deliver behind schedules. This talk addresses the major principles of building highly performing and scalable applications. Common pitfalls found in many real world situations will serve as practical examples. Guidance on how to detect and resolve them will help you to overcome those issues and build better scalable and faster applications.