The speed of your applications can have a massive impact on your users experience, search engine ranking and overall success.
The ability for your applications to remain available during periods of sustained or high traffic can be difference between fame and infamy, success and failure.
Pipe Ten performance services can help you architect faster and more stable software and infrastructure stacks, analyse and optimise existing stacks, continually monitor and repeatedly test all stacks.
Architecting
Application hosting infrastructure should be designed from the ground-up to consider performance and scaling, this includes:
- Auto-Scaling
- Caching
- Code
- Content
- Databases and Indexes
- CDN & Geographic
- DNS
- Load Balancing
- Microservices
- Networking
- Clustering, Mirroring & Replication
- Sharding and Microservices
- Tiering
- Many more
Pipe Ten focuses on architecting fast-stacks as a default, being application and infrastructure agnostic allows us to help you use the best tools for your tasks.
Optimisation
The “stack” of infrastructure, service and software required to deliver an application is wide in scope and deep in complexity, each part often independent technology that is entwined with others and touches all elements of the OSI model.
Pipe Ten is expert in both the big picture and deep layer analysis of web application performance profiling, identifying areas for optimisation and helping implement those optimisations to improve end-user usability and your success.
Optimisation involves phases of analysis, monitoring, testing and reengineering, repeated until achieving and where possible exceeding the desired results.
Monitoring & Testing
Reactive Monitoring
The constant monitoring of application performance (APM) and alerting to any adverse conditions is the best place to start with understanding the performance, availability and capability of your applications.
Beyond the obvious benefits of knowing when performance is sub-optimal so we can respond in real-time, having a continuous historic record of application performance can also help correlate when changes to the application (such as new version or optimisations) have affected performance and any degradation over time.
Comparing the performance metrics of the applications against the resource use of any underlying compute, network and storage can help better understand where bottlenecks may exist during both expected and unexpected traffic volumes.
Proactive Testing
Repeatedly testing your application, software and infrastructure stacks is a critical part of modern application development and maintenance.
Load
Basic load simulation involves defining a set of actions typical to a user, executing those actions with volume and concurrency, while continually monitoring the availability, performance and resource usage resulting from. These metrics typically help define a baseline capability of the stacks and identify where any basic bottlenecks exist for further exploration and optimisation.
Smoke
Smoke load testing is a set of user typical simulated actions executed on-demand over a short period of time so as to to verify there are no changes in performance or capability after a change has been made within the stacks.
Soak
Letting your application “soak” in a non-extreme but substantial amount of traffic over a long period of time can help identify resource run-away which might not otherwise be apparent. Common examples include memory exhaustion due to application leaks, storage exhaustion due to missing log rotation and auto-increment exhaustion due to integer sizing.
Stress and Spike
Simulating an extreme concurrency and/or volume of traffic over normal (stress) and short (spike) periods of time in intended to take you application up to and then beyond the point of unavailability. Only when the application has been broken in this was can one be certain it will gracefully or otherwise recover as expected.
Classification: Public
Last saved: 2024/03/18 at 13:40 by Carl