Performance – meaning and key metrics

The small decisions that we make every day include the following:

It seems as if these don't have any impact on the application's performance, and in most cases, they don't. However, making the right decision not only improves an application's speed, but also makes it more stable. This gives higher performance in application development. The small changes that we make every day make a big impact at the end of the year.

High performance is very crucial. The performance of an app is directly related to user experience. Users want to get results immediately; they don't want to wait for the view to load, see a long Loading indicator, or see a lagging animation.

Every year, our computers and devices become more and more powerful, with more CPU speed, memory, storage, and storage speed. Performance problems could seem irrelevant because of this, but the software complexity increases as well. We have more complex data to store and process. We need to show animations and do a lot of other things.

The first way of solving a performance problem is by adding more power. We can add more servers to handle data, but we can't update our clients' PC and mobile devices. Also, adding more power doesn't solve the code performance issue itself, but just delays it for some time.

The second, and correct, solution is to remove the issue that causes the performance problem. For that, we need to identify the problem, the slow piece of the code, and improve it.

There are many things that impact an application's performance and user experience. We will cover the following key metrics:

The most important of these and the one that has the biggest impact is the operations' performance speed. It tells us how fast a particular task can be performed, for example, creating a new user, reading from a file, downloading an image, searching for a person with a particular name, and so on.