The service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts such as loose coupling may have negative impact on the overall execution performance of a single request. There are ways to facilitate high performance applications which benefit from this kind of architectural style compensating the caused overhead significantly. This paper gives an overview on six high level strategies to improve the performance of SOAs with a central service bus and presents how to apply them to build high performance service-oriented applications without corrupting the SOA paradigm and concepts on the technical level.