Rico and I have long talked about performance threats.  I finally created a view that shows how you can think of performance issues in terms of vulnerabilities, threats and countermeasures.  See Performance Frame v2. 

In this case, the vulnerabilities, threats and countermeasures are purely from a technical design standpoint.  To rationalize performance against other quality attributes and against goals and constraints, you can use performance modeling and threat modeling.  To put it another way, evaluate your design trade-offs against the acceptance criteria for your usage scenarios, considering your user, system, and business goals and constraints.