  Considering the paradigmatic driven Brownian motion, we perform extensive
numerical analysis on the performance of optimal linear-response processes far
from equilibrium. We focus on the overdamped regime where exact optimal
processes are known analytically, and most experiments operate. This allows us
to compare the optimal processes obtained in linear response and address their
relevance to experiments, using realistic parameter values from experiments
with optical tweezers. Our results help assess the accuracy of perturbative
methods in calculating the irreversible work for cases where an exact solution
does not exist. For that, we present a performance metric comparing the
approximate optimal solution to the exact one. Our main result is that optimal
linear-response processes can perform surprisingly well, even far from where
they were expected.
