Businesses are struggling when their brand-new application develops into a total performance disaster. It’s time to stop trial & error tuning experiments. In this post, I will give you valuable insights how to overcome performance nightmares.
Application Performance should become a fundamental part of all development, delivery, and support teams because user experience is already ruling the world. There is evidence that slow loading websites result in lower sales figures. Your engineers developed outstanding new products, but somehow customers are not buying the brand-new products online. An often neglected reason for this is a not responsive, slow loading web application. Follow the five tips below to make your application’s performance great again.
# Design for Performance
One pitfall is that your teams focus mainly on functional needs and neglect non-functional aspects such as response time and throughput. Avoid such issues and start with the specification of performance requirements during early design stages. The number of concurrent users expected response times and number of requests should be defined for both, average and peak load scenarios. Build awareness of your development teams required to code their systems with performance in mind. Automated baseline testing is a great instrument to detect hotspots already on development stages.
# Test for Performance
Functional and security testing are well known and widely practiced. Manual and automated testing teams carry massive test sets for their applications, execute those regularly and report defects back to development teams. For some reason, quality assurance is often not happening for non-functional aspects such as response time. Don’t run into this pitfall. Consider load and performance engineering in your QA phases. Perform web page design checks, average, and peak volume load tests at least on your pre-production stages.
# Ops for Performance
Post-deployment all teams are happy that they finished their product and after the go-live party, operational units are entirely responsible for this solution. Developer jump to new assignments and often have just limited time to fix and tune systems in operation. Typically, performance hotspot has a long storyline. Step-by-Step load times increase and add some point they rise sharply. Once this happens, it’s too late for ad-hoc fixes. Build awareness that performance monitoring is a must-have discipline for your applications deployed in production. Review performance metrics regularly, share insights with development teams and remove bottlenecks before they affect your end-user.
# Tools for Performance
A modern performance engineer is familiar with a broad range of freeware, on-premise, and on-demand load testing and monitoring suites. They can guide businesses on their journey to make the best selection. Performance optimization is all about experience and tools. Outstanding performance engineering platforms save your teams valuable times for analysis and optimization. IT Leaders often choose commercial platforms because they let you recycle assets created during pre-production stages for performance monitoring on production environments. Load injection, system resource, transaction tracing, health monitoring and application performance monitoring solutions are a must for your performance toolbox.
# Culture for Performance
Information hiding kills your performance engineering initiative. Even if you have more than ten years experience, there is no shortcut or best practice you should hide. Full transparency about what works and what ends on a one-way road will push your team forward. Use collaboration platform to document step-by-step instructions for successful problem resolutions in your field of business is probably the best chance to get this to fly.
Start your engines and follow these simple steps to eliminate slowdowns entirely in your Dev & Ops environments.