Network Performance Tuning
Keep-alive, compression, payload size and round-trip elimination.
4 to work through
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intermediate
What happens when a load balancer closes idle connections after 60 seconds while the client's connection pool keeps them for 5 minutes?
3 min answer -
advanced
A client library opens a new HTTPS connection for every request. One host sends 2,000 requests per second to a single destination endpoint. What breaks first, and in what order does everything else follow?
2 min answer -
advanced
A content platform finds that transfers to distant clients achieve far less throughput than the available bandwidth. What are the causes and what tuning applies?
2 min answer -
advanced
An internal API call takes 40 ms consistently while the server reports 2 ms of processing. Where is the time going?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Ephemeral Port Exhaustion
The failure in which a host runs out of source ports for new connections to one destination, producing connection errors that look like the remote be…
practiceNetwork Performance Tuning
The application-level and connection-level changes that actually improve networked performance, in order of effect.
conceptPayload Compression Trade-off
The exchange of CPU time for reduced transfer time, which is favourable on constrained networks and harmful on fast local ones.
Neighbouring topics
Performance & Capacity
General material on performance and capacity engineering.
Latency
Distributions rather than averages, and the floors physics imposes.
Throughput
Work completed per unit time, and why it trades against latency.
Concurrency
Operations in flight, and the limits that are the real capacity ceiling.
Queueing Theory
Why latency explodes as utilisation approaches capacity.
Little's Law
L = λW, and the pool sizes it computes directly.
Bottleneck Analysis
Finding the constraint, and expecting a second one behind it.
Tail Latency
p99 behaviour, amplification across fan-out, and hedged requests.
Load Testing
Realistic data, realistic mix, and a ramp rather than a step.
Stress Testing
Pushing past target to learn what breaks first and how it fails.
Soak Testing
Long runs that surface leaks and slow degradation.
Capacity Modelling
Arithmetic before load tests, and headroom for failure as well as peak.
Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
Scale out for stateless, scale up first for stateful.
Caching for Performance
Layer choice, hit ratio as a first-class metric, and cold-cache recovery.
Database Performance
Plans, indexes, contention and the pool in front of the database.
Connection Pooling
The most common hidden ceiling, and the metric nobody collects.
Performance Budgets
Targets enforced in CI so regressions fail the build.
Profiling & Optimisation
Measuring before optimising, and optimising the dominant term.
Peak Event Readiness
Freeze, pre-scale, shed order, warm caches and rehearse.