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14 ways to optimize your application’s real-world performance

Users care passionately about their software being fast and responsive. You need to give your applications both 0-60 speed and the strongest long-term endurance. Here are 14 guidelines for choosing a deployment platform to optimize performance, whether your application runs in the data center or the cloud.

Faster! Faster! Faster! That killer app won’t earn your company a fortune if the software is slow as molasses. Sure, your development team did the best it could to write server software that offers the maximum performance, but that doesn’t mean diddly if those bits end up on a pokey old computer that’s gathering cobwebs in the server closet.

Users don’t care where it runs as long as it runs fast. Your job, in IT, is to make the best choices possible to enhance application speed, including deciding if it’s best to deploy the software in-house or host it in the cloud.

When choosing an application’s deployment platform, there are 14 things you can do to maximize the opportunity for the best overall performance. But first, let’s make two assumptions:

  • These guidelines apply only to choosing the best data center or cloud-based platform, not to choosing the application’s software architecture. The job today is simply to find the best place to run the software.
  • I presume that if you are talking about a cloud deployment, you are choosing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) instead of platform as a service (PaaS). What’s the difference? In PaaS, the operating system is provided by the host, such as Windows or Linux, .NET, or Java; all you do is provide the application. In IaaS, you can provide, install, and configure the operating system yourself, giving you more control over the installation.

Here’s the checklist

  1. Run the latest software. Whether in your data center or in the IaaS cloud, install the latest version of your preferred operating system, the latest core libraries, and the latest application stack. (That’s one reason to go with IaaS, since you can control updates.) If you can’t control this yourself, because you’re assigned a server in the data center, pick the server that has the latest software foundation.
  2. Run the latest hardware. Assuming we’re talking the x86 architecture, look for the latest Intel Xeon processors, whether in the data center or in the cloud. As of mid-2018, I’d want servers running the Xeon E5 v3 or later, or E7 v4 or later. If you use anything older than that, you’re not getting the most out of the applications or taking advantage of the hardware chipset. For example, some E7 v4 chips have significantly improved instructions-per-CPU-cycle processing, which is a huge benefit. Similarly, if you choose AMD or another processor, look for the latest chip architectures.
  3. If you are using virtualization, make sure the server has the best and latest hypervisor. The hypervisor is key to a virtual machine’s (VM) performance—but not all hypervisors are created equal. Many of the top hypervisors have multiple product lines as well as configuration settings that affect performance (and security). There’s no way to know which hypervisor is best for any particular application. So, assuming your organization lets you make the choice, test, test, test. However, in the not-unlikely event you are required to go with the company’s standard hypervisor, make sure it’s the latest version.
  4. Take Spectre and Meltdown into account. The patches for Spectre and Meltdown slow down servers, but the extent of the performance hit depends on the server, the server’s firmware, the hypervisor, the operating system, and your application. It would be nice to give an overall number, such as expect a 15 percent hit (a number that’s been bandied about, though some dispute its accuracy). However, there’s no way to know except by testing. Thus, it’s important to know if your server has been patched. If it hasn’t been yet, expect application performance to drop when the patch is installed. (If it’s not going to be patched, find a different host server!)
  5. Base the number of CPUs and cores and the clock speed on the application requirements. If your application and its core dependencies (such as the LAMP stack or the .NET infrastructure) are heavily threaded, the software will likely perform best on servers with multiple CPUs, each equipped with the greatest number of cores—think 24 cores. However, if the application is not particularly threaded or runs in a not-so-well-threaded environment, you’ll get the biggest bang with the absolute top clock speeds on an 8-core server.

But wait, there’s more!

Read the full list of 14 recommendations in my story for HPE Enteprise.nxt, “Checklist: Optimizing application performance at deployment.”