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This essay, Do worry about performance, refers to improving the overall understanding of article display speed, and storage, and giving helpful ideas to ensure the best operation for everyone's needs. Wikipedia is a relatively complicated system, very difficult for any one person to fully understand how to improve, but by people working together, the system can be more responsive for everyone.
The title of this essay is derived from the old, early essay "WP:Don't worry about performance" that was written years before there were 4 million articles and hundreds of thousands of templates. Originally, it was believed (or imagined by some) that articles would display fast regardless of contents, and later it was hoped that might be true, but finally, the reality was seen how numerous users, ignoring performance for years, had created gargantuan articles that could not be displayed in less than 30 seconds. That seemed to be the end of instant access to the "sum of all human knowledge".
Eventually, many techniques were found to make articles much faster, to display within 9 seconds, and to begin to discuss performance issues in a realistic manner. People learned to avoid some settings in Special:Preferences, which bypassed the quick cache-page feature, such as thumbnail-size set lower/higher than 220px (in 2011).