Common Performance Problems In a Software Web Application

Let's look at a few of the common performance problems encountered in software web applications.

Long Loading Times

Loading time means the initial time it takes to load an application screen or a web page. This time should be low as users find it as a problem if this time is high and lose interest in your application or website. Generally, this should be kept under 5 seconds but depending on the application, this could be difficult to achieve. 

There are some techniques we can use to reduce the loading times which will be discussed in a different post.

High Response Times

Response time is the time it takes when a user performs an action on the application, For example: Click on the save button, until the save action completes and receives an output response.

Underneath, what the application does is send an HTTP POST request to the server and submit the data to the backend. The response time is the time taken to receive the response from the server back again to the client.

Usually, these response times should be low for users to have a better user experience. If the application keeps loading for a long period of time, it is considered a performance problem that needs to be fixed.

Poor Scalability

Scalability means the ability of the application to handle the growing number of users by adding/improving the hardware resources. If the application has poor scalability, it will try to malfunction under increased user load. Scalable apps will adapt to surges in user load to remain stable without affecting its core functionality.

Properly planned scalability testing should be done to determine the application scalability.

Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks are obstructions in a system which can degrade the overall system performance. This could happen due to multiple reasons. It could be due to bad application design, coding issues, hardware problems, etc. This could result in an overall degradation of performance in the application.

Bottlenecks are generally fixed by hardware improvements or code enhancements. Detecting the actual root cause for these bottlenecks could be sometimes difficult.

Some common performance bottlenecks are

• High CPU utilization
• High Memory utilization
• High Network utilization
• Operating System limitations
• High Disk usage