Performance Optimization in

Software Development
Why Performance Optimization?
• In the modern digital landscape, optimizing performance has shifted
from being an optional perk to an essential requirement
• Slow or unresponsive software can not only lead to a frustrating user
experience but also significantly impact business metrics
• When even a millisecond delay can result in losing a potential
customer, there is an urgent need to prioritize performance from the
ground up
• We will focus on different strategies for optimizing performance in
software projects

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Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• KPIs offer quantitative measures of performance, providing valuable
insights into project progress and quality
• Selecting the right software development KPIs enables you to manage
the software development process effectively and ensure that your
client meets expectations
• KPIs are the lifeblood of the software development process, much like
a compass guiding a ship through turbulent waters
• They form an integral part of strategic planning and execution,
ensuring teams consistently move towards achieving their objectives

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Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Specific
• Focusing on particular aspects of the project
• Measurable
• providing quantifiable data that enables assessment
• Attainable
• reflecting goals that are challenging yet achievable
• Relevance
• align with the business objectives and the strategic vision of the project
• Time-bound
• attached to a specific timeline for achieving the target
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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Delivery Time
• It measures the time it takes for a task to be completed and delivered by a
vendor
• It is closely related to the lead time metric, which measures the time from
task initiation to completion

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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Quality Metrics (Bug Rate, Test Coverage)
• It evaluates the quality of the final product and the effectiveness of the
testing process
• The Bug Rate measures the number of defects found in the product
• A high bug rate suggests that there may be problems in the development process that
need to be addressed
• Test Coverage assesses the extent of testing performed on the software
• It measures the percentage of total functions or lines of code that have been tested
• High coverage indicates that a thorough QA process has been implemented, reducing the
chances of unnoticed bugs or issues

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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Scope Change Index
• SCI is calculated by tracking the number and impact of scope changes
throughout the duration of the project
• SCI can be measured on a scale of 0-100, with higher values indicating a
higher frequency and significance of scope changes
• A high SCI may indicate a need for better project planning, stakeholder
engagement, or risk management processes
• It can also highlight the need for more clearly defined project objectives and
requirements, as well as stricter change control procedures
• Keeping SCI in check is essential for maintaining project efficiency, meeting
deadlines, and delivering a high-quality end product

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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Change Failure Rate
• CFR is a measure of the proportion of changes made to a production system
that result in failures or issues
• A high CFR indicates a higher likelihood of problems occurring when changes
are made to the system
• This can be a sign of potential issues in the development process, such as
insufficient testing procedures

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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) Compliance
• This measures how well the company is adhering to the agreed-upon service
levels
• Typically expressed as a percentage, it helps assess the reliability of your
partner and ensures that the quality of service agreed upon is being delivered
and continuously upheld

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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Cost Variance
• It quantitatively measures the financial performance of a project
• It compares the actual costs to the budgeted costs of outsourcing, providing
insights into how effectively the project is being managed from a financial
perspective
• It enables to track and manage costs effectively, ensuring that the project
does not exceed the allocated budget

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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Project Milestones
• It measures how successfully a project meets predetermined milestones
within the established timeline
• By monitoring this KPI, you can assess the progress and performance of a
project, ensuring that key deliverables are being completed on time

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Essential Software Development KPIs
• Customer Satisfaction
• Gathering and analyzing feedback from stakeholders and users can reveal
how well the software meets the business requirements and user needs
• This information can be collected through various methods such as surveys,
interviews, or user testing

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Performance Optimization
• Performance optimization in software development refers to the
process of fine-tuning an application to ensure that it runs as
efficiently as possible, using the least amount of resources like
memory, CPU, and bandwidth
• Performance analysis is performed at different development stages,
but most commonly, it's done when a sustainable version of a product
has already been developed

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Performance Optimization
• The primary purpose of this endeavor is to improve the application's
speed, responsiveness, and overall user experience
• A multitude of factors can affect software performance, including
• inefficient code
• unoptimized databases
• poor asset management
• network latency

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Benefits of Performance Optimization
• Faster applications have significantly better UX, enabling users to
carry out tasks quickly and efficiently
• increasing user satisfaction and retention
• enabling businesses to scale
• growing without any performance issues
• Optimized applications are more scalable, making it easier to adapt to
an increasing customer base or expanded functionality in the future
• Performance optimization reduces downtime and minimizes technical
issues, resulting in improved productivity and cost savings

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Issues Faced
• Lack of hardware resources
• Or vice versa; there may be enough of them, but their combination will be
poor
• Code wise issues
• when the code itself is not optimally executed
• when the application pulls data from the database by queries, and they are
not optimized
• when you can make one query instead of five, which will do the same thing

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Issues Faced
• Incorrect architectural decisions
• This problem may arise when too many queries are sent by a client to a server
• For example, when a user logs in to his mobile bank and immediately
requests data about his profile, card, credit information, deposits, and so on
• Environment configuration
• server settings
• network settings
• routers and so on

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Techniques: Profiling
• The purpose of profiling is to identify software performance
bottlenecks and prepare recommendations for their elimination
• perform regression performance testing
• compare performance metrics on different versions of the service
• analyze statistics on logs and requests
• monitor system metrics and so on
• Profiling tools
• AsyncProfile
• JVisualVM
• JProfiler, and others

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Techniques: Code Reviews
• During code reviews, peers scrutinize each other's code to identify
potential issues, including those related to performance
• Experienced developers can often spot any redundant code or the
one that can be optimized for better performance
• Additionally, peers can look for any database queries or network calls
to reduce latency

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Techniques: Log Analysis
• Logs typically contain a wealth of information
• Examining the ones generated by various systems, applications, or
services helps understand their behavior and identify potential issues
• By regularly reviewing logs, developers can identify unusual patterns
or trends that may indicate performance bottlenecks, such as
increased latency or frequent error messages

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Techniques: Benchmarking
• Benchmarking provides context, helping teams understand how well
their software is doing
• By evaluating metrics like load times and throughput, developers can
identify where their application stands in terms of performance and
what areas require improvement
• Implementing a systematic benchmarking approach enables
organizations to maintain a competitive advantage and ensures that
they meet or exceed industry standards for software performance

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Best Practices for Performance Optimization
• Continuous monitoring is crucial
• it enables real-time identification of issues and provides data to support
iterative improvements
• Regular performance testing under various conditions and scenarios
• ensures that the software can handle different types of user behavior and
system loads effectively
• Collaboration between developers and system administrators is
crucial for effective performance optimization
• developers can provide insights into the code and find areas that can be
optimized, while system administrators can provide insights into the
infrastructure and configurations
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Best Practices for Performance Optimization
• Regular updates and adjustments are necessary to keep up with
evolving technologies and frameworks, which often offer new ways to
improve performance
• Software can be equipped with auto-scaling features to adapt to spikes in
user activity, ensuring consistent performance
• Code refactoring should also be considered as an ongoing practice to
eliminate inefficiencies and incorporate newer, faster algorithms or
methods
• Adoption of modern architectural patterns like microservices, which
can enhance scalability and performance

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Understanding Performance Metrics
• Response time
• measures how long it takes for your system to complete a request, affecting
user satisfaction and engagement
• lower response time generally means a more user-friendly experience
• Throughput
• the rate at which your application can process transactions
• helps to understand how efficiently your system performs under load and
whether it can handle peak usage times

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Understanding Performance Metrics
• Resource utilization metrics
• encompassing CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network usage, provide a granular
view of how well your system's hardware resources are being used
• monitoring these can help identify bottlenecks and allow you to fine-tune
your application for better performance
• Scalability
• refers to how well your application can adapt to increasing workloads.
• a future-focused metric that helps you understand if your current architecture
will serve your needs as your user base grows

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Code-Level Optimizations
• The efficiency of the algorithms you choose drastically affects the
speed and overall performance of an application
• employing well-suited algorithms will reduce computational time and
enhance user experience, making your application not just fast but also more
scalable
• Equally important is the choice of data structures
• selecting the appropriate ones can optimize how quickly data is processed
and accessed, thereby cutting down on performance issues

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Code-Level Optimizations
• Refactoring, the practice of restructuring existing code without
altering its external functionality
• Simplifying and cleaning up code can make it easier to maintain, understand,
and, most importantly, improve its efficiency
• Asynchronous programming adds a layer of complexity but pays off
by making an application more responsive
• It enables a program to perform multiple operations concurrently, thereby
optimizing the use of system resources and improving the user's perception
of speed

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 Asynchronous Programming

Source: https://medium.com/hookdeck/an-introduction-to-asynchronous-processing-and-message-queues-218af596bf1b

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 Message Queue
Example: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ

Source: https://medium.com/hookdeck/an-introduction-to-asynchronous-processing-and-message-queues-218af596bf1b

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Database Optimization
• One cornerstone of this process is query optimization
• crafting efficient SQL queries can profoundly impact how quickly data is
retrieved, directly affecting the user experience
• Poorly designed queries can be one of the most significant bottlenecks in an
application, leading to slow load times and increased server load
• Indexing comes in as another potent tool
• when correctly implemented, indexes accelerate data retrieval, reducing the
amount of time needed to satisfy user requests

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Database Optimization
• Caching takes optimization a step further
• by storing the results of frequent queries so that the same calculations don’t
have to be recomputed
• this dramatically reduces the workload on the database, thereby increasing its
performance
• Database sharding
• which involves dividing data across multiple servers and can help your system
scale horizontally
• more advanced technique but becomes increasingly important as your
application grows and the volume of data you handle increases

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 Database Caching
Example: Redis

Source: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-caching-system-design-932a6bdf3334
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Source: https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/vertical-partitioning-vs-horizontal
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Frontend Optimization
• The frontend often serves as the first point of interaction for users, so
its performance significantly shapes the overall user experience
• Minification and compression are techniques that reduce file sizes,
speeding up page load times
• This makes the application more responsive, which is particularly beneficial
for users with slower internet connections or limited bandwidth
• Lazy loading optimizes performance by only loading the necessary
components or elements of a page as they are needed rather than all
at once
• This not only reduces the initial load time but also saves resources

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Frontend Optimization
• Reducing HTTP requests is another key strategy
• bundling images into sprites and combining CSS and JS files can considerably
reduce the number of requests, thereby improving load times and conserving
bandwidth
• Leveraging a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• can distribute the load, serving an application's static resources from the
nearest geographical locations to your users
• This results in faster load times and less strain on any single server

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 CDN

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
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Backend and Network Optimization
• Load balancing is a technique that distributes incoming application
traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that no single server is
overwhelmed
• This not only improves responsiveness but also enhances reliability during
peak load times
• Microservices architecture is another critical component, enabling
you to decouple various parts of your application
• This results in better scalability and more effective resource allocation

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 Load Balancing

Example: HAProxy (software), F5 (hardware)

Source: https://www.cloudns.net/blog/load-balancing/
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 Microservices

Source: https://microservices.io/patterns/microservices.html
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 Microservices

Source: https://microservices.io/patterns/microservices.html
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Backend and Network Optimization
• The use of modern protocols like HTTP/2 and WebSockets can
significantly speed up data transfer rates between the client and
server
• HTTP/2, for example, allows for multiple simultaneous interactions over a
single connection, while WebSockets enable real-time communication
• Server tuning, often an overlooked aspect, can bring considerable
performance gains
• This involves optimizing server configurations, from thread count to buffer
sizes, to ensure that the server is capable of handling more requests per
second

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Testing and Monitoring
• Automated performance testing, using tools like JMeter and
LoadRunner, allows for consistent and repeatable tests that can
simulate various load conditions
• These tests help in identifying performance issues before they affect the end-
users, allowing developers to make adjustments proactively
• Real User Monitoring provides invaluable insights into how your application
performs in the real world, by gathering data from the end-user devices
• Continuous monitoring, using tools such as New Relic and Datadog to
keep a pulse on the application's performance metrics in real-time
• This approach helps in promptly identifying and resolving issues, thus
maintaining a high level of service quality
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Testing and Monitoring
• Performance audits should also be conducted at regular intervals to
evaluate the application against best practices and current standards
• These audits often provide a roadmap for future optimization efforts and
keep the team focused on performance as a key quality metric

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Acknowledgments
• Performance Optimization in Software Development: Speeding Up
Your Applications by SENLA, Software Engineering Laboratory

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