Performance is defined as the responsiveness of the application to perform specific tasks in a given span of time. It is scored in terms of throughput or latency. Throughput is the number of events in a given span of time while latency is the time it takes to respond to an incident. An application's performance directly impacts software scalability. Enhancing an application's performance often enhances scalability by virtue of reducing shared resource contention.

Performance attributes specify the timing features of the application. There will be a few features that will be more time-sensitive than others. The NFRs should mark the functions that have constraints on their performance. For example, response time relates to the times used to complete specific business processes, batch or interactive, within the target business system. The application must be architected to meet the agreed response time requirements, while supporting the organizational workload.