Whether monitoring applications hosted from the cloud, or internally, continuous performance improvement is necessary. Apps that perform better save time, allowing for greater upward expansion.

One way to streamline applications is through what’s known as load testing. What is Load Testing? Examples, tutorials, and more can be found at Stackify.com; according to the site, this practice is: “…an important component of the application development lifecycle. Without it, your application could fail miserably in real-world conditions.”

If you know your limitations in practice, you can keep usage from ever approaching or overcoming those thresholds in reality. You won’t lose money because an application froze through too many user requests. This is one of many tips; ten more will follow.

1. Live activity monitoring/resolution of bottlenecks and issues: You’ll be able to see bottlenecks coming and divert resources to contain them. Sometimes that means switching servers (or cloud hosted networks) from which an app is hosted — whatever best serves your company.

2. Secure and accelerate apps via reverse proxy server: Sometimes it isn’t the speed of your machine that’s causing things to slow, it’s the necessary delegation involved. Reverse proxy servers are designed to handle internet traffic. These can get rid of the “distractions” of online duties a server must perform, allowing it to concentrate on secure app delivery.

3. Tuning web servers for expanded performance: A web server won’t automatically be tuned for the best web application performance; that’s something you’re going to have to do proactively.

4. Linux tuning to facilitate better performance: Linux underlies most systems, and if you want to fine-tune its performance in relation to your apps, three things you can do are: increase the number of connections it’s possible to put in the backlog queue, add file descriptors per connection, and establish ephemeral ports — that is: NGINX-derived temporary ports.

5. Updating software versions; 2.0 – 3.0, etc.: Ensure software is the most recent version. If you’re using Generic Software v2.0, upgrade to v2.2.

6. Caching of dynamic and static content: Cached data makes your web app look better because content gets to clients more quickly. This also reduces the load on the application/server.

7. Addition of load balancing solutions: An example of a load balancer would be a reverse proxy server. There are different kinds of load balancers, look around to see what you can put into operation, and what best fits your business as well as the application you’re trying to maintain.

8. SPDY or HTTP/2 implementation: In 2012, Google brought SPDY to the ‘net. It was supposed to be faster than HTTP/1.x. Now, based on SPDY, HTTP/2 has arrived and been approved. Basically, if you’re not on SPDY or HTTP/2, you should be.

9. SSL/TLS optimization: SSL and TLS encrypt and secure transported data, increasing security as well as SERP-ranking, as Google gives such sites preference.

10. Data compression: The more compressed the data, the better. Constantly search out effective ways to compress (and un-compress) data to see see performance results.

Optimized Applications

Data compression, optimization solutions, load balancers, content caches, software updates, Linux optimization, web server tuning, proxy servers, and activity monitoring can do wonders for your application. If you apply such optimization methods correctly, you’ll see the results you seek.