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Recommendations for optimizing code and infrastructure

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Applies to this Azure Well-Architected Framework Performance Efficiency checklist recommendation:

PE:07 Optimize code and infrastructure. Use code that's performant, and ensure that it offloads responsibilities to the platform. Use code and infrastructure only for their core purpose and only when necessary.

This guide describes the recommendations for optimizing code and infrastructure performance. To optimize your code and infrastructure, you should use your components only for their core purpose and only when necessary. When you overuse code and infrastructure, it creates unnecessary resource consumption, bottlenecks, and slow responses. To compensate for those inefficiencies, you must add more resources to accomplish the same tasks.

Definitions

Term Definition
Concurrency When multiple tasks or processes are performed at once but not necessarily at the exact same time.
CPU architecture The components and principles that affect how the computer works.
Data compression The action of reducing the size of files by minimizing redundant data.
Heap An area in memory used for runtime memory allocations.
Memory leak When a workload fails to release allocated memory after the memory is no longer needed.
Parallelism When multiple tasks or processes are performed at the same time.

Key design strategies

Optimizing code and infrastructure entails fine-tuning the code and the supporting infrastructure to improve performance efficiency. It requires performant code that executes tasks quickly and doesn’t waste resources. It requires a well-designed infrastructure that is streamlined to avoid unnecessary complexity. A workload should use the inherent capabilities of the platform. It's an approach that helps ensure both code and infrastructure are used primarily for their core purposes and only when necessary.

Optimize code performance

To optimize code performance, modify code to reduce resource usage, minimize runtime, and enhance performance. You can modify code to improve the efficiency and speed of a software program. Don't mask performance issues with brute force. Brute force means adding compute resources to compensate for code performance, like adding extra capacity instead of addressing the source. You need to fix performance issues with optimization. When you optimize code performance, it helps maximize the utilization of system resources, improves response time, reduces latency, and enhances the user experience.

Instrument your code

Instrumenting code refers to the practice of adding code snippets or libraries to code that collect data and monitor code performance during runtime. Code instrumentation allows developers to gather information about key metrics such as resource consumption (CPU, memory usage) and execution time. By instrumenting code, developers can gain insights into code hot paths, identify performance bottlenecks, and optimize the code for better performance efficiency.

In an ideal environment, you should do code analysis early in the software development lifecycle. The earlier you catch a code issue, the cheaper it's to fix it. You want to automate as much of this code analysis as possible. Use dynamic and static code analysis tools to reduce the manual effort. However, keep in mind that this testing is still a simulation of production. Production provides the clearest understanding of code optimization.

Tradeoff: Code monitoring tools are likely to increase costs.

Identify hot paths

By instrumenting your code, you can measure the resource consumption for different code paths. These measurements help you identify hot paths. Hot paths have a significant effect on performance and resource usage. They're critical or frequently executed sections of a program that require high performance and low latency. To identify code hot paths, consider these steps:

  • Analyze runtime data: Collect runtime data and analyze it to identify areas of the code that consume significant resources, such as CPU, memory, or I/O operations. Look for patterns or sections of code that are frequently executed or take a long time to complete.

  • Measure performance: Use profiling tools or performance testing frameworks to measure the execution time and resource consumption of different code paths. It helps identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

  • Consider business logic and user effect: Evaluate the importance of different code paths based on their relevance to the application's functionality or critical business operations. Determine which code paths are crucial for delivering value to users or meeting performance requirements.

Optimize code logic

Optimizing code logic is about refining the structure and design of code to perform tasks with fewer resources. Improved logic reduces unnecessary operations. It creates faster execution with less resource consumption. You should remove any unnecessary operations within the code path that might affect performance. Prioritize optimizing hot paths to see the greatest performance efficiency gains. To optimize code logic, consider the following strategies:

  • Remove unnecessary function calls: Review your code and identify any functions that aren't essential for the desired functionality and might affect performance negatively. For example, if a function call performs a validation completed earlier in the code, you can remove the unnecessary validation function call.

  • Minimize logging operations: Logging can be helpful for debugging and analysis, but excessive logging can affect performance. Evaluate the necessity of each logging operation and remove any unnecessary logging calls that aren't critical for performance analysis.

  • Optimize loops and conditionals: Analyze loops and conditionals in your code and identify any unnecessary iterations or conditions that can be eliminated. Simplifying and optimizing these structures can improve the performance of your code. Minimize function calls within loops, and eliminate redundant calculations. Consider moving computations outside the loop or using loop unrolling.

  • Reduce unnecessary data processing: Review your code for any unnecessary data processing operations, such as redundant calculations or transformations. Eliminate these unnecessary operations to improve the efficiency of your code.

  • Optimize data structures. To efficiently store and retrieve data, select appropriate data structures, such as arrays, linked lists, trees, and hash tables. Choose the best data structure for a specific problem. A suitable data structure improves application performance.

  • Minimize network requests: If your code involves making network requests, minimize the number of requests and optimize their usage. Batch requests when possible and avoid unnecessary round trips to improve performance.

  • Minimize allocations: Identify areas where excessive memory allocation occurs. Optimize the code by reducing unnecessary allocations and reusing existing resources when possible. By minimizing allocations, you can improve memory efficiency and overall performance. Use the appropriate memory management and garbage collection strategies for your programming language.

  • Reduce data structure size: Assess the size of your data structures, such as classes, and identify areas where reduction is possible. Review the data requirements and eliminate any unnecessary fields or properties. Optimize memory usage by selecting appropriate data types and packing data efficiently.

  • Use performance-optimized SDKs and libraries. Use native SDKs or performance-optimized libraries. Native SDKs are designed to interact with the services and resources on a platform or within a framework. For example, cloud-native SDKs work better with cloud service data planes than with custom API access. SDKs excel at handling network requests and optimizing interactions. Performance-optimized libraries, such as Math.NET, contain performance-optimized functions. When you apply the functions appropriately, you can improve your workload's performance.

  • Cross-cutting implementation: Consider the effects of cross-cutting implementations, such as middleware or token checks, and assess whether they negatively affect performance.

Review the performance recommendations specific to the programming language you're working with. Evaluate your code against these recommendations to identify areas for improvement.

Tradeoffs:

  • Optimizing code and hot paths requires developer expertise in identifying code inefficiencies is subjective and might be highly skilled individual required for other tasks.
  • SDKs provide convenience and eliminate the complexities of interacting with APIs. But SDKs might limit your control and customization options for custom code.

Optimize memory management

Optimizing memory management involves refining the way a workload uses, allocates, and releases memory resources to improve efficiency. Proper memory management improves code performance because it reduces the overhead of memory operations. Efficient memory usage reduces latency, prevents system slowdowns or crashes, and maximizes the throughput of computational tasks. Consider the following strategies to optimize memory management.

Debug memory issues. Memory dumps are application memory snapshots. They capture the memory state of an application at a specific point in time. Memory dumps enable retrospective analysis of memory-related issues. Select the appropriate type of memory dump based on the nature of the problem you're trying to diagnose and the resources available. You should use miniature dumps for routine debugging and full dumps for complex, critical issues. This strategy provides a balance between resource usage and diagnostic capabilities. Many code hosting services support memory debugging. You should prefer services that support memory analysis over those services that don't. Here are the basic steps to debugging memory issues:

  1. Capture memory dumps: Begin by setting up a mechanism to capture memory dumps during your application's runtime. The capture can be triggered manually, automatically, or when specific conditions (like excessive memory consumption) are met. Some cloud services might already offer this process.

  2. Analyze memory dumps: After you collect the memory dumps, analyze them. Numerous tools can assist you in inspecting these dumps, such as WinDbg for Windows applications or GDB for Unix-based systems.

  3. Identify memory leaks: Focus on identifying memory leaks during the analysis. Memory leaks arise when your application allocates memory but fails to release it when the memory is no longer required. Search for objects or data structures that remain in memory even when they should be deallocated.

  4. Fix and test: Upon identifying the problematic code, concentrate on resolving the memory issues. Resolutions might involve releasing memory correctly, optimizing data structures, or reevaluating memory management practices. Confirm that your solutions undergo rigorous testing to ensure their efficacy.

  5. Iterate and monitor: Memory management is a continuous process. Routinely monitor your application's memory usage and persist in collecting memory dumps in production. Regularly revisit the analysis and optimization stages to make sure memory issues don't reappear with subsequent code modifications.

By incorporating memory dump analysis into your software development lifecycle, you can amplify the reliability and efficiency of your applications. It helps to reduce the likelihood of memory-related issues in production.

Reduce memory allocations. Minimize memory allocations to reduce the overall memory footprint of the code. Your workload can utilize the available memory efficiently. There's less need for the garbage collector to reclaim unused memory, and it reduces the frequency and duration of garbage collection cycles. Memory allocations can be costly, especially if you perform them frequently. Minimize memory allocations, so the code can run quickly and efficiently.

Caches store frequently accessed data close to the processor, which improves performance. When you minimize memory allocations, there's less contention for cache space, so you can effectively utilize the cache. A high number of memory allocations can degrade application performance and generate errors. Other ways to minimize memory allocations include:

  • Local variables: Use local variables instead of global variables to minimize memory consumption.

  • Lazy initialization: Implement lazy initialization to defer the creation of objects or resources until they're needed.

  • Buffers: Manage buffers effectively to avoid allocating large memory buffers.

  • Object pooling: Consider object pooling to reuse large objects instead of allocating and deallocating them.

For more information, see Reduce memory allocations and The large object heap on Windows systems.

Use concurrency and parallelism

Using concurrency and parallelism involves executing multiple tasks or processes either simultaneously or in an overlapping manner to make efficient use of computing resources. These techniques increase the overall throughput and the number of tasks that a workload can process. When you run tasks concurrently or in parallel, it reduces the runtime of the application and decreases latency and increases response times. Concurrency and parallelism enable efficient utilization of computing resources, such as CPU cores or distributed systems. Concurrency and parallelism effectively distribute the workload among the computing resources.

Use parallelism. Parallelism is the ability of a system to simultaneously trigger multiple tasks or processes on multiple computing resources. Parallelism divides a workload into smaller tasks that are run in parallel. You can achieve parallelism by using techniques like multiprocessing or distributed computing. Distribute tasks across multicore processors to optimize workload management. Optimize code to take advantage of the CPU architecture, threading models, and multicore processors. When you run code in parallel, performance improves because the workload is distributed across multiple cores.

Use concurrency. Concurrency is the ability of a system to run multiple tasks or processes. Concurrency enables different parts of a program to make progress independently, which can improve overall performance. You can implement concurrency by using techniques like multithreading, in which multiple threads run concurrently within a single process. You can also use asynchronous programming, in which tasks are triggered concurrently.

  • Asynchronous programming: Asynchronous programming is an approach to trigger tasks without blocking the main thread. Asynchronous programming enables a program to trigger tasks while waiting for long-running operations to finish. With asynchronous programming, the program can initiate multiple tasks and wait for them to complete asynchronously. The program doesn't have to wait for each task to finish before moving on to the next one.

    There are many asynchronous programming techniques and patterns, depending on the programming language and platform. One common approach is to use asynchronous keywords and constructs, such as async and await, in languages like C#. With these keywords, you can define asynchronous methods. For HTTP traffic, consider using the Asynchronous Request-Reply pattern.

    Many frameworks and libraries provide built-in support for asynchronous programming. For example, in the .NET platform, you can implement asynchronous operations by using patterns like Task-Based Asynchronous pattern and Event-Based Asynchronous pattern. The specific implementation of asynchronous programming varies depending on the programming language, platform, and requirements of the application.

  • Queues: A queue is a storage buffer located between a requesting component (producer) and the processing component (consumer) of the workload. There can be multiple consumers for a single queue. As the tasks increase, you should scale the consumers to meet the demand. The producer places tasks in a queue. The queue stores the tasks until a consumer has capacity. A queue is often the best way to hand off work to a processing service that experiences peaks in demand. For more information, see Queue-Based Load Leveling pattern and Storage queues and Service Bus queues.

Use connection pooling

Connection pooling is the practice of reusing established database connections instead of creating a new connection for every request. It can be expensive to establish a connection to a database. You have to create an authenticated network connection to the remote database server. Database connections are especially expensive for applications that frequently open new connections. Connection pooling reuses existing connections and eliminates the expense of opening a new connection for each request. Connection pooling reduces connection latency and enables high database throughput (transactions per second) on the server. You should choose a pool size that can handle more connections than you currently have. The goal is to have the connection pool quickly handle new incoming requests.

Understand connection pooling limits. Some services limit the number of network connections. When you exceed this limit, connections might slow down or terminate. You can use connection pooling to establish a fixed set of connections at startup time and then maintain those connections. In many cases, a default pool size might consist of only a few connections that perform quickly in basic test scenarios. Your application might exhaust the default pool size under scale and create a bottleneck. You should establish a pool size that maps to the number of concurrent transactions that are supported on each application instance.

Test the connection pool. Each database and application platform has slightly different requirements for setting up and using a pool. Test your connection pool to ensure it works efficiently under load.

Risk: Connection pooling can create pool fragmentation and degrade performance.

Optimize background jobs

Many applications require background tasks that run independently of the UI. The application can start the job and continue to process interactive requests from users. Examples of background jobs include batch jobs, processor-intensive tasks, and long-running processes, such as workflows. Background tasks shouldn't block the application or cause inconsistencies due to delayed operation when the system is under load. To improve performance, you can scale compute instances that host background tasks. For more information, see Background jobs and Scaling and performance considerations.

Optimize infrastructure performance

Optimizing infrastructure performance means enhancing and adjusting infrastructure elements to ensure peak operation and the best use of resources for a workload. By fine-tuning infrastructure, you can minimize waste, reduce lags, and achieve more with the available resources. It ensures that workloads run reliably and swiftly, leading to improved user experiences and cost savings. To optimize infrastructure performance, consider the following strategies:

Add usage limits. You can implement usage limits on some workload components. For example, to remove unstable pods, you can define pod CPU and memory limits in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To optimize performance, you can define memory limits in Java virtual machines (VMs).

Streamline infrastructure. Simplify your workload to reduce the potential for interaction, dependency, and compatibility issues. When you simplify your workload, you optimize resource utilization of memory, processing power, and storage.

Reduce load. To reduce load on a workload, minimize the demand placed on an application and enable resources to perform their primary tasks. For example, it's common practice to avoid running security solutions within your code or on individual compute instances. Instead, web servers should serve HTTP requests. Web application firewalls and gateway resources can handle security checks. The following strategies help reduce the load on your workload:

  • Eventual consistency: Adopt an eventual consistency model to enhance performance by allowing data to be slightly dated. Eventual consistency reduces the immediate demand on CPU cycles and network bandwidth for constant data updates.

  • Delegate tasks: Delegate server tasks to clients or intermediaries, such as search indexes and caches. Delegate tasks like sorting data, filtering data, or rendering views. When you offload these tasks, you reduce the workload on your servers and improve performance.

Optimize the network. To optimize a workload network for performance, configure and fine-tune the network infrastructure. Ensure that the workload can operate at its highest level of efficiency.

  • Network protocols: Upgrade to modern protocols like HTTP/2, which enable multiple requests to be sent over a single connection. Modern protocols reduce the overhead of establishing new connections.

    Tradeoff: Modern protocols might exclude older clients.

  • Network chattiness: Batch network requests together to reduce the number of requests. Instead of making multiple small requests, combine them into larger requests to reduce network overhead.

  • Database queries: Ensure that database queries retrieve only the necessary information. Avoid retrieving large amounts of unnecessary data, which can lead to increased network traffic and slow performance.

  • Static data: Utilize a content delivery network to cache frequently accessed static content that's close to the users. When you cache data, it doesn't have to travel over long distances. Caching improves response times and reduces network traffic.

  • Log collection: Collect and retain only the log data that's necessary to support your requirements. Configure data collection rules and implement design considerations to optimize your Log Analytics costs.

  • Data compression: Compress and bundle HTTP content and file data to allow fast transmission between clients and servers. Compression shrinks the data that a page or API returns and sends back to the browser or client app. Compression optimizes network traffic, which can accelerate application communication.

    Tradeoff: Compression adds server-side and client-side processing. The application must compress, send, and decompress data. Multicast communication, or communication to multiple recipients, can create decompression overhead. You need to test and measure the performance variations before and after implementing data compression to determine if it's a good fit for your workload. For more information, see Response compression in ASP.NET Core.

Azure facilitation

Instrumenting code: Azure Monitor Application Insights supports automatic instrumentation (autoinstrumentation) and manual instrumentation of application code. Autoinstrumentation enables telemetry collection without touching the application's code. Manual instrumentation requires code changes to implement the Application Insights or OpenTelemetry API. You can use Application Insights Profiler to help optimize hot paths.

Optimizing code logic: Azure offers SDKs and libraries for various programming languages to interact with Azure services. Use SDKs to simplify interactions between applications and Azure resources. SDKs provide optimal interaction with Azure services, which reduces latency and enhances efficiency.

Optimizing memory management: Use the smart detection feature of Application Insights to analyze memory consumption and help to identify and address memory leaks.

Azure App Service has a profiler and memory dump collection and analysis feature. The App Service autohealing feature can automatically take memory dumps and profile traces of .NET and Java apps.

Using concurrency and parallelism: Different Azure services provide unique support for concurrency, such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Functions and Blob storage. For parallelism, services AKS supports deploying containerized applications, which improves parallel processing.

Azure Batch is a cloud-based job scheduling service that you can use to enable parallel and high-performance computing without the need for infrastructure setup. For more information, see Background jobs.

Optimizing infrastructure performance: Implement Azure Resource Manager templates to define and deploy infrastructure by using code. Use these templates to implement efficient, repeatable, and consistent resource deployments. Azure Policy provides governance capabilities to ensure that resource deployments adhere to organizational best practices and standards.

For asynchronous programming, use scalable queuing services, like Azure Queue Storage and Azure Service Bus, to facilitate asynchronous programming. You can queue tasks and independently process them. To support asynchronous operations, Azure Marketplace offers third-party queues and tools that you can integrate with Azure services.

Performance Efficiency checklist

Refer to the complete set of recommendations.

Performance Efficiency checklist