Assessing Network Performance for Salesforce Users
Profiling application performance and running performance tests are critical ‘laboratory’ activities to validate that your Apex and SOQL code is optimized for scalability and that Visualforce page designs are following best practices. However, to make sure your application is ready for the real world, you need to also take into account that users will be accessing it from various geo-locations with different levels of network connectivity.
We’ve created a network best practice guide for architects to help you understand what you need to look out for and how to find solutions to network related challenges. The guide covers topics on how to set up controlled testing environments, how to reduce payloads and network latency and tools you can use to accomplish various tasks.
Network Best Practices for Salesforce Architects
The CCE Technical Enablement Team has worked on a number of cases where customers’ Visualforce pages took longer than expected for their users with high network latency. We’ve worked together to assess network performance by using tools that look into the page payload and check for possible network connectivity issues. In one case, an assessment identified issues with the page design and the solution was to apply Visualforce performance and web design best practices to minimize page load. In another case, we used tools to analyze network connectivity and routing. By working with customers and ISP partners, we fixed inefficient routing and misconfigured intermediate devices.
As an architect, your mission is to successfully design and launch an application that performs well even with such network variation. You certainly don’t want to hear from end-users after the application goes live saying “Why is my page taking so long to load when my colleague can load it in a second?”
Related Resources
- Network Best Practices for Salesforce Architects
- A Guide to Application Performance Profiling in Force.com
- Performance Testing Your Force.com Application
- Visualforce Performance: Best Practices
- Dreamforce Session: Building Efficient Visualforce Pages
- Performance Tuning for Visualforce and Apex
- Architect Core Resources
About the Author and CCE Technical Enablement
Daisuke Kawamoto is an Architect Evangelist within the Technical Enablement team of the salesforce.com Customer-Centric Engineering group. The team’s mission is to help customers understand how to implement technically sound salesforce.com solutions. Check out all of the resources that this team maintains on the Architect Core Resources page of Developer Force.