Performance Considerations

Experiments show that every second of application load delay causes a significant loss in an organization’s revenue. Therefore, an application’s performance is one of the most critical attributes of solution design that can impact the growth of your product’s adoption.

In the previous chapter, we discussed various solution architecture design patterns that can be used to solve a complex business problem. In this chapter, we will explore some best practices to optimize the performance of your application that need to be done at every layer and with every architecture component. You will learn how to choose the right technology for the various layers of your architecture to continuously improve your application’s performance. We will focus on the following topics in this chapter:

• Design principles for high-performance architecture
• Technology selection for performance optimization
• Performance considerations...

Design principles for high-performance architecture

Architectural performance efficiency focuses on using application infrastructure and resources to meet increasing demand and technological evolution. Performance efficiency guides architects to create systems that not only meet current needs but are also agile enough to scale and evolve, ensuring that performance remains robust and responsive as user expectations and technological landscapes shift. Let’s examine some vital design principles for your workload performance optimization.

Reducing latency

Latency can significantly affect your product adoption because users are looking for the fastest applications. It doesn’t matter where your users are located; you need to provide an efficient and reliable service for your product to grow. Latency is a measure of the time taken for a packet of data to get from one designated point to another. In simpler terms, it’s the delay or lag you experience between initiating...

Technology selection for performance optimization

In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, you learned about various design patterns, including microservice, event-driven, cached-based, and stateless patterns. An organization may choose a combination of these design patterns depending on their solution’s design needs. You can have multiple approaches to architecture design, depending on your workload. Once you have finalized your strategy and start to implement your solution, the next step is to optimize your application. To optimize your application, you must collect data by performing load testing and defining benchmarking as per your application’s performance requirements.

Performance optimization is a continuous improvement process in which you need to be cognizant of optimal resource utilization from the beginning of solution design until after the application’s launch. You need to choose the right resources as per the workload or tune the application and infrastructure...

Performance considerations for mobile applications

Mobile applications have now become an essential part of many digital platforms. Nowadays, users often first check out the mobile application before visiting the desktop website. Moreover, a significant portion of user traffic is driven via mobile applications, making it crucial to ensure these apps are highly performant. As mobile apps increasingly become a staple of our digital interactions, it’s paramount to guarantee their performance, security, and usability. Let’s delve into some best practices for building efficient mobile applications.

Optimization of load times

In mobile applications, load times are a critical factor that can either augment user engagement or serve as a deterrent. Quick and efficient load times are indispensable, especially considering users often utilize applications on the go and require immediate responses. Some ways to enhance load times are to optimize image sizes, employ lazy loading...

Performance testing

Performance testing is a critical subset of software testing that aims to ensure that a software application will perform well under expected workloads. It revolves around gauging an application’s stability, speed, responsiveness, and scalability under various circumstances. Rather than identifying bugs or defects, performance testing determines how an application will react to different demand levels. Given the fact that today’s users expect seamless and swift functionality, performance testing has never been more crucial.

The significance of a well-performing application can’t be overstated in today’s digital age. Primarily, it directly affects user satisfaction. Users are accustomed to swift and seamless interactions on their devices; thus, a sluggish or frequently crashing app can be a major turn-off. Nobody wants to waste time on an application that doesn’t deliver promptly, especially during moments of high demand or...

Managing performance monitoring

Performance monitoring is essential when you are trying to keep an eye on performance issues and proactively reduce end-user impact.

You should define your performance baseline and raise the alarm to the team in the case of a threshold breach—for example, an application’s mobile app load time should not be more than three seconds. Your alarm should be able to trigger an automated action to handle poorly performing components—for example, adding more nodes to a web application cluster to reduce the request load.

There are multiple monitoring tools that measure application performance and overall infrastructure. You can use a third-party tool like Splunk or the AWS-provided Amazon CloudWatch to monitor any application.

Monitoring solutions can be categorized into active monitoring and passive monitoring solutions:

• With active monitoring, you must simulate user activity and identify performance gaps up front...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the various architecture design principles that impact the performance of applications. You learned about latency and throughput at different layers of architecture and how they relate to each other.

For highly performant applications, you need to have low latency and high throughput at every architecture layer. Concurrency helps to process a large number of requests. You also learned the differences between parallelism and concurrency and gained insights into how caching can help improve overall application performance.

Then, you learned about choosing your technology and its working models, which can help achieve your desired application performance. While looking at the compute options, you learned about the various processor types and the differences between them to help you make the right choice when selecting server instances. You learned about containers and how they can help you to utilize resources efficiently and, at the...