Performance refers to the system’s ability to meet the required service levels under various conditions, including handling spikes in memory demand. In this case, the architect is ensuring that the cluster can handle memory spikes of up to 20% without contention, which is a key performance requirement to ensure that the workloads run optimally during peak business hours.

The ability to accommodate these memory demands without impacting performance directly aligns with ensuring that the system performs as expected under peak load conditions.