Top 5 Factors That Impact Your Software Performance

What are the main factors that can negatively impact your software performance? What should you be looking out for? Learning where software is failing helps businesses identify the bottleneck. Failing to address the issues puts systems at risk of becoming inefficient, unreliable, and insecure. Needless to say, this has negative consequences for the overall performance of a business.

That being said, here are the top five factors that impact your software performance.

1. Complexity

The top factor that impacts application performance is the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and services that support the application. These components and services now can span multiple locations – cloud, on-premises data center, hybrid.

2. Interdependencies

Today’s applications and services consist of an assortment of components from multiple vendors (web and application servers, multiple tiers of middleware, databases, big data stores, caching layers, cloud, and other services) that need to function in the expected way to provide a great end-user experience. This increase in the complexity of the application and its supporting components also increases the application’s chance of failing.

3. Microservices

As enterprises are adopting microservices and Continuous Delivery methodologies, the number of independent applications and web services are growing exponentially. Isolating any application performance issues in an application environment with hundreds and thousands of interdependent services can be challenging if not instrumented and monitored in real time. Manually instrumenting these microservices and setting static thresholds can be a very difficult, if not impossible, task.

4. Latency

Latency is the top factor that impacts performance. The most well-developed application will be slow if latency between users and servers is high.

5. Database

According to data from Gleanster Research, nearly 90 percent of application performance issues are related to the database layer. This is due to a number of factors — databases are at the heart of most applications, they are complex, and they are difficult to scale horizontally. When an application experiences rapid growth in demand, the database may indeed become the genuine bottleneck. Most other parts of the infrastructure can scale more easily than the database. Scaling out (where the application makes use of multiple database servers simultaneously for scaling reads) is difficult at the application layer, requiring recoding to take advantage of readable secondaries.