ROOT6: a Quest for Performance

The sixth release cycle of ROOT is characterised by a radical modernisation in the core software technologies the too kit relies on: language standard, interpreter, hardware exploitation mechanisms. If on the one hand, the change offered the opportunity of consolidating the existing code base, in presence of such innovations, maintaining the balance between full backward compatibility and software performance was not easy. In this contribution we review the challenges and the solutions identified and implemented in the area of CPU and memory consumption as well as I/O capabilities in terms of patterns. Moreover, we present some of the new ROOT components which are offered to the users to improve the performance of third party applications.