Summary

Summary · Chapter 10

Key takeaways

• Correctness beats speed. Fast performance is useless if the application produces wrong results — get it correct first.
• But performance still matters: it’s a large part of the user experience, and users expect responsiveness regardless of device or location.
• Performance is a quality attribute. Document performance requirements and make them measurable and testable, like any other requirement.
• The whole team should own performance.
• Use a systematic, iterative improvement approach — profile, analyze, change, monitor. Some problems surface only later, so be ready to analyze and optimize repeatedly.
• The chapter covered three levers: server-side caching, web application performance techniques, and database performance.

What’s next

Chapter 11 turns to security considerations — the goals of security, design principles and practices, threat modeling, cryptography, identity and access management, and common web application security risks. See Securing software systems.

Chapter concepts

• The importance of performance
• Defining performance terminology
• Taking a systematic approach to performance improvement
• Server-side caching
• Improving web application performance
• Database performance

Citations

• Software Architect’s Handbook (Packt, 2018), Ch.10 “Summary”, p. 818.