A method, apparatus, system, and signal-bearing medium that in an embodiment request a program or programs to tune themselves to run faster or slower if a service class is not meeting its performance goal. In an embodiment, the program is repeatedly requested to incrementally tune itself until the performance goal is met or until no further improvement occurs. In various embodiments, the programs to be requested to tune themselves are selected based on whether the programs are bottlenecks for the service class, whether the programs do the majority of work for the service class, whether the programs easily meet their own performance goals, or whether the programs are low priority. In this way, the programs may be performance tuned in a way that is more effective and less intrusive than by adjusting global, system-level resource allocations.