Nowadays, a lot of companies create their own business application that will improve the workflow, enhance efficiency and increase overall performance. These apps are also called enterprise applications because they are designed to serve business needs rather than those of the customers or an individual.

These applications are fundamentally complex to build, which leads to common performance issues. The problem is that companies want these apps developed quickly. After all, the market they operate in is highly competitive and time is, indeed, of the essence.

However, quickness and good performance are two different things, and they don’t complement each other well in such environments. If you want something built fast, chances are that it won’t work as well as you’d imagine.

Regardless of whether you create an app from scratch or develop it using a platform, performance issues are bound to happen sooner or later.

These issues typically occur when you start adding tons of data, start integrating an app with external services and adding custom code that’s not error-proof. To enhance the stability and performance of your enterprise applications, consider incorporating app crash reporting tools. These tools play a crucial role in monitoring and detecting issues, providing valuable insights to resolve potential problems. With the right strategy in place, including robust crash reporting mechanisms, you can effectively run enterprise applications with high performance.

Improve visibility of app performance

The performance of an enterprise app is most commonly neglected during the development phase. Simply building an app isn’t nearly enough to ensure its high-performance. You have to ensure that the app works in a bigger picture, i.e., can be integrated with other services, such as OS, third party APIs, databases etc.

That’s why it’s important to improve visibility and transparency of app performance and testing. One of the most efficient ways to do so is to implement app monitoring and reporting or app performance management. That way, you can identify performance issues, localise them, repair, test and prevent similar issues from happening in the future.

This monitoring should be handled by a team of people that consists of SQA specialists, developers, app administrators and the operations team. The fact of the matter is that you must have insight at all times on how the app affects the network, as well as end-user experience so that you can boost its performance.

Implement a proper infrastructure

Administrators have to manage an enterprise app that connects to a company’s network in various ways. Bandwidth issues can slow down the app to a point where it’s no longer responsive. Furthermore, lack of computing power (due to a slow CPU power and a lack of memory, for example) can also slow down the app.

These scenarios typically occur when you have shared resources in cloud or virtual environments. Therefore, for your application to run as it should, you need to implement a proper infrastructure. A good example is opting for HCI integrated solutions that can easily solve server capacity and network bandwidth issues.

HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) is a modern technology that high-performance servers are based on. With a proper infrastructure in place, your enterprise app can utilise all the resources it needs to increase its own performance and reliability. Without an infrastructure to back it up, your app won’t perform as well as you need it to.

As a matter of fact, the enterprise app is built for company purposes, which means it needs to utilise company resources. Simply put, you can’t have a high-performance enterprise app working in your favour if you don’t provide it with sufficient resources it needs to reach that high-performance.

Optimise the app

A high-performance enterprise application can support a business in many ways. However, one of the main challenges app administrators face is ensuring that the app does what it’s supposed to do while being easy to use for the end-users. To achieve this, administrators have to ensure that the app is well-optimised.

They can do so by optimising and minimising database queries. By minimising the number of database calls made within the app, you can significantly improve the performance of the apps. That said, analyse all the calls to determine if they are truly necessary and if not, remove them altogether.

Moreover, you can tune the database tables by adding appropriate indexes that will speed the queries up. This comes down to optimizing queries in MySQL. Last but not least, check to see if app databases have stored redundant data over time. This data can either be archived or utterly deleted based on its relevancy and usability.

Load test the app

In the end, the app’s performance can be determined by load testing it. In other words, you have to stress test the app to determine just how far it can go under a certain load before it stops performing well. This will give you insight into the apps overall performance, as well as possibilities for future improvements. In addition, this will allow you to specify the app’s requirements. Here are a few things you should test for:

The total number of users
The maximum number of users expected to use the app simultaneously
The total number of apps running on a single platform
The complexity of each app running
The total amount of data these apps will generate
The company’s network infrastructure

The main reason such testing is necessary is to determine in which environment the app performs the best. For example, an environment with a small number of users using a single, highly complex app may draw out more resources than an environment with many users using multiple simple apps. If users are only able to use one app at a time then some optimisation and improvements are required.

As mentioned before, creating an enterprise application is a complex task. Moreover, ensuring that the app is high-performing is yet another challenge. But just because something is challenging it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to achieve. That said, with the right infrastructure and strategy in place, your company can ensure that the app is not only built fast but also that it has the performance required to give your business a much-needed boost.

Jolene Rutherford is a marketing specialist – turned blogger with an interest in digital marketing and new technology trends.