Understanding performance and scalability in API development
Performance in computing refers to how efficiently a system or application executes tasks under a given workload. Efficiency has two aspects:
- Speed of processing: This is measured mostly in terms of response time (latency) and throughput (how many operations or how much data the system can handle per unit of time).
- Consumption of resources: This refers to the amount of resources required, such as CPU, memory, and network bandwidth utilization, to do the work.
Statistics are an integral part of performance measurement because it makes sense to measure performance when the system processes a large number of different requests involving different amounts of data. Therefore, the time and other resources required to fulfill a request inevitably fluctuate and depend on a number of factors, making the actual measured values of the performance characteristics virtually random in nature.
It is usually...