This document discusses MongoDB performance tuning. It emphasizes that performance tuning is an obsession that requires planning schema design, statement tuning, and instance tuning in that order. It provides examples of using the MongoDB profiler and explain functions to analyze statements and identify tuning opportunities like non-covered indexes, unnecessary document scans, and low data locality. Instance tuning focuses on optimizing writes through fast update operations and secondary index usage, and optimizing reads by ensuring statements are tuned and data is sharded appropriately. Overall performance depends on properly tuning both reads and writes.