The Need for Robust Performance Engineering in Peak Times

As festivities or peak events approach us, organizations are witnessing a growing need to brace themselves for a surge in user-traffic on their websites. Handling the load of millions of users during peak times can present organizations with unanticipated performance bottlenecks – from which, a way out comes in with the right performance engineering services. But before delving into such strategies, let’s first look at a few bottlenecks.

Performance Bottlenecks during Peak Times

With a sudden influx of user-load, organizations often face an array of roadblocks – a few can even be long-lasting than the others. Let’s have a close look at these:

• Crashing applications or websites – When it comes to festivities or any other peak time, applications or websites often crash due to an excessive user-load. This is an extremely common occurrence – a very recent instance was with India’s CoWIN application crashing due to the massive user-load coming onto the platform to register. This essentially led to the portal being down for users to book their vaccination appointments for quite a while. Thus, during peak times, it becomes extremely significant to sustain a voluminous user-load for a seamless experience.
• Slow load time – During peak times, it becomes extremely important to sustain the user-load, given the hiked traffic of users. For instance, if a user shops for a Black Friday sale or Christmas and comes across a dismal user-experience because the website’s load time is too slow, it can result in losing the user’s allegiance. With such a slow response time, a website or an application’s performance plummets down drastically – becoming a key bottleneck.
• Losing out on users – Akin to the aforementioned aspects, users’ allegiance can mightily go down or their interest can be lost within seconds if a product doesn’t meet the users’ performance expectations. Adding to a product’s badwill, such an experience becomes a key bottleneck from a user’s standpoint.

These bottlenecks essentially imply the need to avail end-to-end performance engineering services during peak times. Although performance engineering refers to a whole gamut of nuances, let’s look at the key ones for eliminating any bottlenecks.

Nuances within Performance Engineering

As an umbrella term for maintaining end-to-end performance, there are certain key facets to consider for identifying and eliminating load and performance bottlenecks. These are:

• Performance testing – For ensuring that an application or a website is bereft of any performance anomalies, performance testing becomes a key effort to undertake. With the right set of open-source or commercial load and performance testing tools, such as JMeter, WebLoad, etc., performance testing needs to be thorough and foolproof. The whole process from identifying scenarios, creating test scripts, execution and report generation, should be conducted for ensuring optimum elimination of any performance bottlenecks.
• Performance management and monitoring – Application Performance Management (APM) plays a crucial role in analyzing how well an application performs post release. Monitoring also becomes important in pre-production and the production environment to ensure optimum performance. With the right set of APM open-source tools such as Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana, etc., an application’s performance can be effectively measured, monitored and optimized.
• Shifting left and right – Needless to mention the importance of adopting a wholesome approach of shifting left and right with performance engineering – by shifting left, performance facets should be effectively embedded from the very early-stages of a product’s life cycle; shifting right needs to be adopted for ensuring that users’ feedback and expectations are met. Thus, performance engineering needs to be a continuous process throughout a product’s life cycle – from its development to its reception by users.

An array of nuances come into play to ensure seamless performance of a product – from continuous testing to deploying effective CI/CD pipelines for expediting SDLC. For effectively identifying and eliminating any bottlenecks or anomalies, a wholesome and coherent performance engineering approach needs to be adopted by organizations.

Conclusion

Thus, performance engineering, as implied, is a continuous process – during peak times or not. Even when the user-load is stable, performance engineering services are a must and the effort needs to be conducted at all times – peak times may come and go but performance engineering should last forever. Thus, performance engineering needs to be a well-thought out process – by deploying the right set of tools, technologies and strategies.