A Few Tips for Improving the Performance of Your Web Applications

In this post, we will mostly be talking about a few things that we should keep in mind while writing web APIs to get the best possible performance out of them. Most organizations work with large amounts of data that need to be processed every second. So, it's very important to keep things organized and optimized in order to deliver a great user experience. Let's discuss a few points to help you understand how we can work more of performance optimization.

Virtual Tables

If you're using MySQL or any other SQL-based database, using virtual tables is the best thing that you can do. Let's look at an example. I have three databases and in a single query I am fetching data from four different tables. This process may take some time. In that case, you can create virtual tables in your SQL databases, which are sometimes referred as views, and keep all the columns that you want to retrieve from all four tables. This time, instead of looking at all four tables, the query will pull everything into a single table. This will help to reduce the response time.

Please note: Views references the values from the original tables but can't update the data in the views. Meaning, you can use views only for GET operations. If anything changes in the original table, it will affect the values in the virtual table that you've created. 

Database Indexing

Indexing is very helpful if you have tons of records in your table and your query is taking too long to fetch the data. Indexing will help you to reduce the strain put on the SQL server. Indexing is pretty much the same thing as looking at the index page in a book. You find the specific topic's page number and jump right to that page.

Note: Using indexing can increase the size of your database. Please see your requirements before using SQL indexing.

Caching Techniques

Creating virtual tables and database indexing is not always an option when we have to work on optimizations at the application level. So let's take a look at some caching techniques. 

For Spring Boot, the Spring team has implemented in-memory and other cache abstractions that you can use to improve the performance of your application. It works on the principal that if a method has been executed once for a given parameter then it should not execute again for the same parameter. The second time you make a request with the same parameter the application will return the response from the cache without invoking the actual method. A lot of cache providers are out there that you can integrate into your web applications as needed. 

A Multi-Threaded Approach

This is one of the techniques that I like most. Nowadays, a lot of programming languages have multi-threaded techniques that you can implement to reduce the work load on a single core and utilize all the available resources using a multi-threaded environment. This allows you to process the data faster than you could in a non-threaded environment. These environments have their pros and cons, so be sure to read up on multi threading environments before using them in your application to avoid dead locks and other issues.

If you're using Java, you can leverage the streams feature included in the JDK to reduce the workload and make data processing faster. Using a functional approach will not only help you to increase your performance, it will help you get access to more advanced features.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope this will help you in some way!