One of the tasks we enjoy the most is making web sites and applications super-fast.
Process
Like every IONICA project, we start with your business needs. We listen to you, to learn what your goals are, and broadly, how you want to achieve them.
We monitor, analyse and tune *everything* from web server activity, database query speeds, network speed and congestion, memory utilisation, CPU load, to I/O, and lots more. We work closely with your developers and business stakeholders to make sure every change is thoroughly tested and measured for the desired results.
Terminology
Web site and application performance has several dimensions, all of which affect traffic levels, stickiness, user experience, and engagement. Some key metrics:
Time to first byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for a web site to deliver the very first byte of data to an end-user’s web browser. It is a key metric used by search engines in determining site rankings. As well, a high (slow) time to first byte can cause delays in a web site appearing on screen and affect users’ perceptions of your product and organisation.
Page load times — how fast do key pages load? Page load times are probably the most commonly assessed metrics in evaluating site performance.
Responsiveness — how fast do dynamic page elements load and render on screen?
Action
Some of the steps we take to make your entire application stack efficient and running at peak performance:
- Log analysis
- Monitoring
- Application server and container configuration and tuning
- Opcode Caching
- Static asset caching
- Database query caching
- Database server and cluster performance tuning
- Load Balancer Tuning
- Firewall tuning
- Operating system tuning
- Hardware performance optimisation