What are the main factors that can negatively impact your software performance? What should you be looking out for? Learning where software is failing helps businesses identify the bottleneck.
Failing to address the issues puts systems at risk of becoming inefficient, unreliable and insecure, and needless to say – have negative consequences for the overall performance of a business.
- Complexity
The top factor that impacts application performance is the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and services that supports the application. These components and services now can span multiple locations – cloud, on-premises data center, hybrid.
- Interdependencies
Today’s applications and services consist of an assortment of components from multiple vendors (web and application servers, multiple tiers of middleware, databases, big data stores, caching layers, cloud, and other services) that need to function in the expected way to provide a great end-user experience. This increase in the complexity of the application and its supporting components also increases the application’s chance of failing.
- Microservices
As enterprises are adopting microservices and continuous delivery methodologies, the number of independent applications and web services are growing exponentially. Isolating any application performance issues in an application environment with hundreds and thousands of interdependent services can be challenging if not instrumented and monitored in real-time. Manually instrumenting these microservices and setting static thresholds can be a very difficult task, if not impossible.
Read about the solution in our upcoming blogpost “Microservices Done Right”.
- Latency
Latency is the top factor that impacts performance. The most well-developed application will be slow if latency between users and servers is high.
- Database
Nearly 90 percent of application performance issues are related to the database layer*. This is due to a number of factors — databases are at the heart of most applications; they are complex, and they are difficult to scale horizontally. When an application experiences rapid growth in demand, the database may indeed become the genuine bottleneck. Most other parts of the infrastructure can scale more easily than the database. Scaling out – where the application makes use of multiple database servers simultaneously for scaling reads – is difficult at the application layer, requiring recoding to take advantage of readable secondaries.
*According to data from Gleanster Research
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Marcin Warpechowski