Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

Chapter 18. Designing for Performance

This chapter takes a brief look at some patterns and practices you can employ to improve the solution's overall performance. It is important that performance enhancements do not affect the functionality of the application. Understanding the end-to-end processing helps to identify areas where performance enhancements can be implemented. Most modern code profilers will highlight issues and performance concerns with the source code. Modern database systems also include profilers for ascertaining the database performance. In most cases, they contain huge rule sets that cover a wide variety of functionality. It is important to use these tools wherever possible to ensure that any concerns are highlighted and addressed. This chapter looks at just a few of the most popular performance-tuning techniques. The goal is to ensure that you have a good idea of where you could implement them and ensure that they are captured appropriately. It may not be necessary to actually implement all the techniques, but it helps to understand where they could be implemented.

This chapter is organized into the following sections:

• Tuning the Database Layer — Examines a few areas within the database where performance can be improved, including:

  • Indexing tables

  • Partitioning tables and data

  • Optimizing queries

  • Caching database data

• Tuning the Application Layer — xs Examines some specific functionality that the application can implement to improve performance, including:

  • Avoiding ...