What is a performance assessment
Salesforce Lightning Performance assessment gives us insights into the Lightning application’s performance characteristics.
Performance assessment is Salesforce Lightning performance testing plus metrics from all connections made by the application to provide an end-to-end view and actionable information to help us optimize Lightning applications for a better experience for users, enabling them to do their tasks efficiently.
In this article, we will discuss the user-facing app performance, discuss solutions for assessment(testing), and benefits. This article is for architects and managers to enable you to take the right decisions for your Salesforce application performance and boost productivity.
User-facing applications and performance
Performance is the time taken for a transaction or request to complete irrespective of which layer the transaction is currently on.
User-facing application transactions usually start in a browser, and the browser then makes requests to backend systems, therefore the performance of these apps depends on the following factors –
- Browser performance
- Machine performance
- Network bandwidth
- Backend server
- Business logic code
- Remote systems for API callouts
Each of these layers has its own metrics.
Assessment solutions for user-facing applications
For user-facing Lighting applications, assessment starts with a Salesforce Lightning performance test also called a user experience test.
A performance test is an accurate simulation of a single user’s actions and end-to-end transactions created by the user’s actions. The performance test accurately creates user transactions on all the layers just as a real user would.
Moreover, modern applications like Salesforce Lightning are component-based, these components are rendered in a browser and only retrieve data from the backend systems. One of the main reasons for the performance tests use of a browser.
For a complete assessment of performance metrics from all other backend systems, integrations, and callouts have to be collected. This is needed because if these connections are synchronous then the Lightning page has to wait for data from the system before it is fully loaded and interactive to the user. Impacting user’s experience.
What are the benefits?
Regular Lightning performance assessment is immensely beneficial for the following reasons
- Provides great experience to employees and customers boosting their productivity.
- Keeps application healthy for the long term and prevents degradations
- Is cost-effective as performance testing is simpler, and major fixes and costly assessments can be avoided by proactively addressing small performance problems.
- Builds confidence and stability in the applications after code releases.
Conclusion
We believe automated proactive assessments are simple and are definitely worth doing to keep application costs low and user experience high. It is a win-win.