Improving the performance of a Web Application or website can sometimes be difficult depending on the factors that are contributing to downgraded performance. In some cases, performance issues may be related to server hardware or network issues to limitations which would usually cost money to improve. In other cases, there are many factors that can impact on the overall performance of a web application or website that can be changed easily.
When a database is used to store data that is required by an application to function or display information to end-users, it is sometimes hard to know exactly how it should be developed before the system has deen in production. It will be much easier once a system is in production to see what works well and what doesn't, but it is too late by this stage as making major structural shanges to a database and schema with existing data will be difficult, time consuming or not possible at all without having to re-build some components from scratch.
To prevent having to completely re-work a datanase schema ofter it has been developed an incorporated into a live application, you need to have a strong understanding of the goals and objectives of the system, major components / processes and their primary function, as well as how each component and process pull together technically. This will allow a database schema to be designed that caters for all of the intended data types, using appropriate primary and secondary keys on each table to allow associated data form different to be joined logically. Understanding the application as a whole will also help to indicate what DBMS would be appropriate to satisfy all requirements of the system, as well as to provide sufficient security measures to keep the database and data safe.
Improving the performance of an application or website that is already in production can be achived by analysing traffic and usage data, as well as database statistics to determine which areas are more frequently used and if there are database queries that are slow, impacting on the overall performance of the application. Finding the specific scripts that are causing components of the application to function slowly and working to improve programming logic and database queries on these is a good start, but time is best spent working in areas that are also frequently used when in production. There is not much pojnt in optimising a script, database table and/or query if it it only saves a few seconds of loading time and the page is only accessed once a month or so.
Optimising the hompage of a website on the other hand would in most cases be time better spent, as the volume of users is generally greater, resulting in a more significant improvement in the overall performance of the application. Finding a ballance, between pages / database queries that are slow and pages or scripts that are most frequently requested/executed will help to improve the performance in problem areas first, which will result in the most significant increase in overall performance.
Improve Performance for Websites with a Database Back-end & Dynamic Content
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