Book Image

Mastering High Performance with Kotlin

Book Image

Mastering High Performance with Kotlin

Overview of this book

The ease with which we write applications has been increasing, but with it comes the need to address their performance. A balancing act between easily implementing complex applications and keeping their performance optimal is a present-day requirement In this book, we explore how to achieve this crucial balance, while developing and deploying applications with Kotlin. The book starts by analyzing various Kotlin specifcations to identify those that have a potentially adverse effect on performance. Then, we move on to monitor techniques that enable us to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize performance metrics. Next, we look at techniques that help to us achieve high performance: memory optimization, concurrency, multi threading, scaling, and caching. We also look at fault tolerance solutions and the importance of logging. We'll also cover best practices of Kotlin programming that will help you to improve the quality of your code base. By the end of the book, you will have gained some insight into various techniques and solutions that will help to create high-performance applications in the Kotlin environment
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Identifying Performance Bottlenecks

How well does it work? How fast is it? These questions mean essentially the same thing if we're talking about software. Although the question about saving technical resources isn't as relevant as it was in the early years of the computer industry, developers still should be careful about the efficiency of systems. Even though efficiency starts with hardware, modern computers have such large instruction sets that it's possible to use them in any manner.

Engineers spend a lot of time and effort to avoid a drain on the Central Processing Unit (CPU), to save battery life, or to make an animation of the user interface much smoother. So the question about performance is relevant nowadays, and software engineers should be careful with system resources.

Before we begin, let's review the topics we will be looking at:

  • Reasons for performance issues
  • Memory model
  • Slow rendering