This review focus on the holistic approach technologies and strategies of energy-efficient residential building retrofitting. Besides, energy balance between both energy demand side and renewable energy supply side are discussed with the integration of different renewable energy technologies, such as advanced insulation, high efficient heat pump, solar aided energy system, combined heat and power plants, dynamic control strategies. Moreover, this review especially focused on the retrofitting problems and challenges of traditional residential buildings which is mostly built before 1960s, which accounts for 14.5% of the overall CO2 emission based on 2015 levels. Combined with these retrofit technologies, several reference residential building cases in Europe are analysed, indicating six main problems from pre-retrofit simulation to retrofit operation process that obstacle the retrofitting performance. To bridge the performance gaps, this review discussed the building performance simulation models and optimisation algorithms. The optimisation function have mathematical characters of multi-objective, multi-variability, multi-disciplinary, multi-constrained (4M) with discrete, non-linear characteristics. Applying the optimisation strategies model is an essential to build a deep understanding between building performance simulation (BPS) and building performance optimisation (BPO), which help engineers to make an optimised holistic retrofitting decisions.