Why Performance Matters

Performance takes many shapes and forms in web development since there are so many moving pieces to make a website always ready and available to our users. As a developer, if someone asked for help regarding a website being slow, what advice would you recommend? It’s a tough question to answer verbally without examining the website. With websites, there may be times when performance isn’t just one technology; the problem may be more than one bottleneck.

For instance, when loading a web page in the browser, do you see content appear, but images take a long time and paint row by row? How about accessing the database? Do you have slow queries where the server takes a minute to retrieve records? Are web APIs performing at more than two seconds for each request?

As you can see, performance is an analysis of an entire website including browser, server, C#, API, and database.

Amazon published a study calculating that if a page load slowed down...