I will discuss some of the types of optimisations that I performed on the Rakudo Perl 6 Core to make Rakudo Perl 6 about 3x faster in 2016 for many applications. How some optimisations became less necessary because of optimisations in MoarVM and/or nqp, but still made sense to do in the end. How a lot of optimisations were just about cutting out unnecessary intermediate steps that would make sense in any programming language. And how readability and elegance of the code suffered. No C code was involved, so basic Perl skills should be enough to follow this presentation.