Full Stack JavaScript Strategies

Chapter 10. Backend Performance

Now that you’ve got an app that’s ready for production, it’s time to look at some performance improvements you can make. This is where you start looking at metrics and tweaking your infrastructure and configs. Making changes to the code can also improve your performance, so never underestimate a good refactor.

How you handle performance updates will vary greatly depending on your app. Deciding where and how to make performance improvements will take insight into how the app works, what’s currently happening, and how it’s expected to grow. Once you get these data-driven answers, you can start looking at trade-offs among the options you have. I’ll go over a few things you might research as your app is used by more people.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about:

• Metrics

• Alerts and monitoring

• Caching

• Product considerations

• Other ways to speed up performance

Taking care of performance enhancements can be an exciting time because it means the product is being used. This is one time when having meetings can be helpful because this is going to involve costs to your organization. Stakeholders see the product from a different perspective, and that can help you make decisions about the best approach.

Metrics

To determine if you need to look at performance enhancements, figure out what brought up the topic in the first place. Were users reporting slower load times, or was the server crashing under a certain load? The enhancements can also be a preventive ...