Causes And Fixes For Slow Mobile Apps

With advanced technology, people want their work to be done instantly these days. They don’t have the patience to wait for something to open up as they just don’t have time for it. So, if your app won’t respond instantly, they are sure to switch to another app. In fact, stats have shown that your conversion rate falls by 7% for every extra second your page takes to load. Thus, it is a priority of every app development company to make sure that their apps load fast.

However, as you need to catch the fish making the water dirty so that you can clean the water, you need first to know the common causes for slowing down of the apps so that you can fix them. The iPhone app development company has dug out the causes that slow down the apps and come up with prompt fixes for these issues. Let’s check them out.

Cause #1: a Large amount of data and sluggish client

With most of the applications being web-based, most of the user-interaction work is pushed to the client station. This work is accompanied by too much data which takes time to process and is accompanied by multi-second pauses before the client displays the updates. Even if the app is not web-based but has a significant amount of data associated, it will slow down the app as the server will take longer to load it.

Fix it: In case of web-based applications, you can deploy high-quality Application Performance Management (APM) system to identify clients with internal processing delay and differentiate human “think time” delays from application pauses. Compressing data ranging from rich graphics to sounds and video content makes the loading of the app dramatically faster without compromising the aesthetics or functionality of the app. However, it is very important to use the right compression standards for different components.

Cause #2: Hackneyed, burdened, and slow server

Rather than the network, most of the times it is the server that is slow as it is multitasking in the multi-tiered infrastructure of modern applications by running the application code at the backend, retrieving files from the disk from the middleware, switching tasks, and also interacting with all other users at the front-end. All this overwork going on simultaneously burdens the server and may run out of memory and take too long to process requests. Thus, a number of requests stay pending before being processed.

Fix it: First, you need to understand the functioning of the different components in an application to identify which component is causing the problem. This process is called Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) and is based on information from the earlier monitoring solutions. You can also add a reverse proxy server to shoulder some load of your server and help it work faster both qualitatively and quantitatively. As reverse proxy server can handle internal traffic by connecting directly to the internet, it enables communication with the application server much faster as it builds pages and passes them to the reverse proxy server, which in turn passes these readily available pages to the users without any delay. A load balancer can also be used to distribute traffic and make the job of application server easier.

Cause #3: Obsolete software versions

The frameworks and the software used in the application needs to be regularly updated. Using older versions can drop performance over time as they won’t be able to leverage the novel capabilities like increased enhancements, new compiler optimizations, and more acceptance and backing from the community.

Fix it: You should upgrade to the latest version of the frameworks and software after thoroughly analysing your software stack. The most recent and updated versions are highly compatible and have enhanced capabilities to offer a far superior tuning, stability, performance, security alerts, and bug fixes. All these together can instantly boost the performance and speed of your app.

Cause #4: Unoptimized security and transport layers

As the data transits from the origin to the server, it is encrypted by the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Security Layer (TSL). Thus, it is impossible to avoid these layers. However, the performance and speed of the app can be affected by them as an initial handshake is needed every time a new connection is started. Moreover, the process of encrypting the data on the server and decrypting it to the client brings along ongoing overhead.

Fix it: You need to minimize the overhead from SSL and TLS by optimizing SSL/TLS. This can be achieved by implementing HTTP/2 and SPDY as browsers need only one connection per session, thereby reducing the number of handshakes to just one. Session caching, session tickets, Open SSL, and OCSP are other options that may be used.

Cause #5: Faulty SDKs and libraries

You may be least expecting any problems to arise from the SDKs and libraries that are an integral part of the app development process. However, their safety cannot be guaranteed as third-party libraries are also codes, and it is evitable for codes to have flaws, bugs, and dependencies. Your app may be, thus, slowed down if you use a library without thoroughly checking it and you may be left wondering where the problem is.

Fix it: You need to thoroughly check any third-party libraries and SDKs before using them in the development of your application. Good reviews about the stability, security, and reputation of these tools can be helpful. Thoroughly check and recheck the codes of the libraries you are using and preferable choose those having an actively engaged large community.

Conclusion

Apart from the above-mentioned causes, there may be other causes that make an app to slow down. However, this list gives you an idea about spotting issues that are responsible for the hampered performance of your application and then all you need to do is to work on the solution. As no issue can’t be fixed, after catching the cause, you need to fix it to swift your app performance. Adopting the above fixes can dramatically improve the speed and performance of your app.