Say it with me… «Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Poor PaaS Performance.» I’m sure you have heard the original 7 Ps before. My version is a little different as I have decided to focus on the performance of platform as a service (PaaS). Hopefully this saying will help you remember some of my tips for building higher performance web apps.
The only way to measure the performance of your app is to plan ahead and identify key metrics that can help you gauge how your app is performing. CPU and memory usage are not enough. Identify potential bottlenecks and KPIs within your app and track their every movement. You can track them via statsd, mbeans, Windows performance counters, or other solutions. You can monitor key web requests and database queries via an application performance monitoring (APM) solution. Also don’t forget to have good logging and error tracking in place.