There are many ways to improve software application performance.Here are some of the most impactful techniques:
Use a reverse proxy server
Adding a reverse proxy server like NGINX in front of your application servers can significantly improve performance. A reverse proxy:
Offloads network traffic from the application servers, allowing them to focus on processing requests
Enables load balancing across multiple application servers for scaling
Can cache static and dynamic content to reduce load
Adds flexibility to scale and replace application servers easily
Implement caching
Caching static and dynamic content is one of the most effective performance optimizations:
Cache static files (CSS, JS, images) on the reverse proxy to serve them faster and reduce load on application servers
Implement dynamic content caching by caching generated HTML pages for a short period of time (e.g. 1–10 seconds) This can dramatically reduce the number of pages that need to be generated.
Compress data
Compressing text data like HTML, JS and CSS can reduce bandwidth usage by 30% or more and decrease page load times. SSL/TLS encryption also offsets some of the CPU overhead of compression.
Optimize SSL/TLS
SSL/TLS handshakes and encryption/decryption can impact performance, so:
Enable SSL session caching, session tickets/IDs and OCSP stapling to reduce handshake times
Terminate SSL on the reverse proxy to offload encryption/decryption from the application servers
Implement HTTP/2 or SPDY
These protocols use a single connection rather than multiple connections, which reduces overhead and improves performance, especially when used with SSL/TLS.
Tune your software stack
Updating to the latest stable versions of software, tuning Linux settings, and optimizing configuration of your web server (like NGINX) can all boost performance.
Monitor live activity
Monitoring tools like NGINX Plus can alert you to issues in real-time, catch performance problems early, and help you identify optimization opportunities.
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