Online applications make up a huge portion of websites nowadays. There is a wide variety of these applications ranging from on-demand video streaming services to other complex online apps helping users with their daily lives. All online application developers are racing toward being the fastest yet most reliable service providers within their respective markets. To stay competitive, you should also be exploring techniques to improve online application performance, and here is how to do it.
Implement distributed data processing
Data processing is the nexus of enterprise information or stored consumer insights and application front-end interfaces. The role data processing plays far transcends the bare minimum of making online applications functional, but it also has an effect on app performance. Depending on the type of data processing solution, this technology can either improve online app speeds and reliability or hamper its overall performance.
The field of storing and processing insights has come a long way from the days of disk-based architecture. There are now high-performance data processing solutions available such as distributed caching and operational data stores. The distributed architecture of these technologies allows online applications to run at exponentially high speeds but without being unreliable to end-users.
Implementing distributed data processing solutions to your enterprise systems like online applications can significantly improve its speed and data reliability since it is stored on more than one node. Overall, the performance will be improved, leading to customer satisfaction and positive engagement with the online app.
Reduce data access layers
Some apps might require complex data management architecture, which has several access layers, impeding the online application’s performance. The data access layers might be a necessary evil in some cases caused by gathering insights from disparate sources. Additionally, the aggregated data collected from disparate sources might need to be accessed by several enterprise systems.
In that case, data access layers might be a nightmare, contributing to online apps that load at a snail’s pace. What can be done to improve performance in this regard? Enterprise system developers should reduce data access layers as much as possible.
Instead of querying insights directly to legacy databases, having an operational data store stores currently relevant insights. Applications just simply request the data from the store and do not have multiple access layers. Some cutting-edge streaming companies use this technique to improve their performance which reduces latency and subsequently minimizes video or audio buffering.
In-memory computing
Implementing in-memory computing is a highly effective technique for reducing online application loading times. Applications do not have to query insights and process them on legacy systems, but everything can be done on the cloud. This data processing strategy focuses primarily on storing operational insights, and any irrelevant information is either persisted in a permanent storage location or removed completely.
Fortunately, you can implement distributed technology to in-memory computing by using the RAM units of several nodes within a grid to store the needed insights. The main benefit of this is that in the event of a catastrophic system failure, not all operational insights will be lost.
Online applications will be able to deliver to end-users despite losing the main data processing unit. Since the insights are on several nodes within the in-memory computing grid, this information does not completely get erased when the system fails. At the same time, the application’s latency is not significantly affected.
Optimize application code
Application code does play an important role in application performance. As much as data processing is critical, optimizing the online application’s code is also equally as important. Most programming languages and front-end frameworks are progressively working toward reusing code. The benefits of that are plenty. One of them is improving application performance.
If an app has a lot of lines of code and some are redundant, this creates a redundancy when executing that application. Therefore, carefully analyzing the code and identifying units that could be reused can significantly improve overall app performance. Also, constantly debug the code to ensure that its performance is of high quality instead of impeding the app’s functionality, reliability, and speed.
Whenever necessary, remember that redesigning an application with optimized coding strategies can also exponentially improve online app performance. Redesigning an app could also lead to a more intuitive and user-friendly interface contributing further to the cause of improving performance on a larger scale.
Monitor app performance
As the app administrator or developer, you might not spend much time on the front-end running performance tests. Instead, you might be more hell-bent on ensuring that all backend elements function properly. However, the app might be gradually deteriorating, and overall performance could be slowly diminishing without you being aware.
You might be wondering why traffic is slowing down, and users are quitting, only to find out that the app does not function as well as it did initially for end-users. Therefore, monitoring app performance consistently can alert you to some issues that might be brewing.
Regularly monitoring online application performance rates could warn you of issues before they become a larger problem for end-users. With this information, app developers can quickly work on fixing any performance issues that are building up. Additionally, the developers and administrators will have a holistic view of the application, providing them further insight into where they can improve for higher customer satisfaction rates.
Optimizing online application content
Most apps are very visually intensive. They have a lot of media like videos, audio recordings, and images. All of this visual content could potentially slow down the online application’s performance. If an online application has large media, this will affect both the app’s speed and reliability because most apps with heavy content tend to crash more frequently.
There are several ways to optimize online application content, and one of those strategies is compressing the media. Compress all images, videos, and audio recordings to reduce latency and improve reliability. On the other hand, online application developers should consider implementing a Content Distribution Network (CDN).
This solution will help reduce application loading times significantly, even if compressing the media does not help that much. Collectively implementing these strategies of optimizing online application content will contribute to the overall objective of improving the app’s performance.
