Speed Demon runs October 30 to November 2, 2026, online, with a $2,000 prize pool. Every millisecond is a soul. It is a performance engineering championship: five fixed tracks, each with a naive reference implementation, and the only thing that counts is how much faster and leaner you can make it while producing byte-identical output.
Five problems, any language. Enter one or enter all five. Output must hash-match the reference or the run scores zero.
Submissions are built from the team's own Dockerfile and run by the organisers on one dedicated machine, cores pinned, turbo off, five runs with the middle three meaned. A timing from your own laptop is not evidence. The efficiency coefficient K combines wall time (40%), peak memory (20%), source size (15%), dependency weight (15%) and scaling behaviour (10%), and accounts for 65% of each track's score. The remaining 35% is the panel: code quality, technique, and the required PERF.md optimisation log. Judges review anonymised submissions and do not see the measured leaderboard until their scores are in. Every weight, cap and gate is frozen from October 28 and does not change mid-event.
Registration and the full rules are at speeddemon.dev.
