GitHub has been working diligently to optimize the performance of its website, which is built using the Ruby programming language, known for not being the fastest. The focus is on reducing response times through performance tuning, which involves profiling the codebase to identify and improve less efficient sections. The team utilized the experimental rblineprof tool to trace and analyze execution times in the Ruby VM, particularly targeting the view rendering code in their Rails application. The analysis revealed that the escape_once helper, responsible for HTML escaping, was a performance bottleneck due to costly regex operations and temporary object allocations. To address this, GitHub introduced Houdini, a set of C APIs designed for high-performance web escaping, integrated into the EscapeUtils gem. This new implementation reduced the average request time by 45ms and decreased object allocations by 20,000 per request, demonstrating significant performance improvements. GitHub has made Houdini available as an open-source C library for use in various programming languages, further enhancing performance across different platforms.