I’ve had to privilege of taking part in such projects several times, and one in particular comes to mind. The project marshalled objects from one tier to another in JSON-format. These objects were unusually large, over 1MB in most cases and overall performance was poor. The interesting thing was that only certain segments of the JSON file were necessary for the various HTTP endpoints to process. Pruning the JSON structure wasn’t an option, so I started to look at optimisation.