Nathaniel Catchpole (aka catch) talks about some of the performance-related patches that he has been focusing on for Drupal 7. When Dries gave his State of Drupal keynote address in DrupalCon San Francisco, he presented the Top 20 Drupal 7 core patch contributors and catch was at the top of the list with over 337 patches that he was involved with by that point. He notes that a lot of his patches were a series of smaller performance-related patches that he discovered by using profiling tools such as XHProf and XDebug. He talks about some of the performance changes that got into Drupal 7, as well as how he's been able to work on Drupal 7 core through his job at Examiner.com.

At the time of this recording there were over 120 critical issues for Drupal 7, and at the moment there are around 41 critical issues in the Drupal 7 issue queue.