Your customers are complainin’, your monitors are alertin’, your thumbs are a-twiddlin’—whatever the symptom, the problem is that your application is too slow. And you want to find out why, so you can fix it.
You could spin up your application on your laptop, do some benchmarking, and try to find the bottleneck. Sometimes, that’s all it takes, but quite often, local testing tells you nothing useful. For many performance bottlenecks, the only way to identify the problem is to measure in production.
To understand why, we’ll need to go over all the many ways production might differ from your laptop. In this article, we’ll be focusing on server-based applications where your organization has set up the production environment (including cloud hosting); applications run by third-parties involve even more difficulties.
Some of the differences between development and production that we’ll mention include:
- CPU, memory, and disk speeds.
- Network latency.
- Data inputs.
- Database contents and configuration.
- Just a hint of the complexities involved with cloud services, and more.
- Software versions.