Overall system performance improvements resulting from improvements to individual system components may be predicted by analyzing the effects of artificial performance degradations inserted into the individual components. Measuring and analyzing a negative overall system effect caused by negative changes to an individual component may predict a positive overall system performance improvement resulting from an improvement to the individual component of similar magnitude to the inserted negative changes. System performance prediction may be used to analyze and predict system performance changes related to various computing resources, such as execution time (speed), memory usage, network bandwidth, file I/O, and/or disk storage space, among others. Additionally, by comparing predicted system performance improvements resulting from potential improvements to various components of a software system, the individual components may be ranked according to the amount of improvement required to realize the predicted system performance improvements.