How do you improve software performance with error handling?

Error handling is an integral aspect of software development, influencing performance, reliability, and user experience.By adhering to best practices such as early validation, caching, graceful degradation, resource management, and thorough logging, developers can create software that not only operates smoothly but also responds gracefully to errors, ultimately leading to enhanced performance.

Only add exception handlers around calls to static libraries that you know could throw exceptions, like file IO. Don’t ever throw them intentionally in your application code. Instead, assert that data is in range and return back to the calling thread gracefully with an error code. Using exceptions to drive the control flow is bad practice, resulting in unpredictable timing and too much reliance on the compiler / OS to catch a fault. In addition, for all of your application that you can formally prove your code is correct and absent of runtime errors you can switch off constraint runtime checks and remove exception handlers. Particularly important for high safety and/or security assurance systems.

To manage and improve performance through error management, the following points can be mentioned: 1.Use appropriate error handling mechanisms: Choose the right error handling mechanisms for your programming language or framework. For example, in languages like Java, you can use try-catch blocks to handle exceptions. 2.Handle errors at the appropriate level 3.Avoid excessive logging in production 4.Implement efficient error recovery mechanisms 5.Perform error handling asynchronously 6.Optimize error handling code 7.Test error scenarios and performance 8.Monitor and analyze errors in production

You can cache the results of your operations that are resource-intensive and not likely to change frequently, this will let you handle the error. And sometimes, error handling itself can become a performance issue if not implemented efficiently. So consider asynchronous error handling, especially for I/O operations, to prevent blocking the main thread. Also try to regularly monitor logs to identify patterns and recurring issues, allowing proactive problem-solving. Hope this is helpful.

We should follow "fail fast approach", means we should detect and fail early the incoming request as soon as we find it is not valid and not suitable to proceed. It will release request thread early to free up resources for next incoming (possibly valid) request. Otherwise the request will keep on utilizing resources and will degrade performance. For example if a string type needs to be persisted in DB and has a size limit in DB then instead of getting it automatically failed from DB we should validate it on interface layer and fail instead of letting it hop all layers.

The process to design a class that will connect to third-part systems or APIs starts with the prevention of each failure scenario. When you think about the possible errors before start the code, you will build a more maintainable class. The process of test is crucial in this scenario to avoid discover errors only after the deployment.

Error handling is not just about putting a try catch block, or throwing a custom exception. Yes these are important and necessary but the journey doesn't end there. Proper error handling is the starting point of good resiliency and observibility practices. If you have a proper way of segregation exception on their type as per the business domain and logging it when they happen, also using the same for metric counters. These error logs and error metrics can be used as the input for the continuous monitoring tools. This would enhance visibility into your service which is one of the crucial aspect for modern Microservices.

The title of the article made me confused. We never improve the performance of an application with error handling... we improve it by not having errors to begin with... Then I thought the article would focus on best error handling techniques for better performance... But... no... it is again another article that doesn't really has a matching title and focus, again, on common things, like "design patterns". When talking about pre-conditions and post-conditions, you never talk about using specific types to do the pre/postcondition checkings, something that should be a well known part of OOP as a big part of OOP came from C++ and RAII in C++ is directly related to both error-handling (and avoiding) as well pre/postcondition checks.

In my experience error handling and monitoring let us know what is user facing while using system. Proper error handling and monitoring along with continuous action on those errors will help make system stable and no functionality loss to user or bad user experience. Proper Error handling and logging is key part of system reliability.

To make the software more reliable I suggest testing all the error paths. Especially important with more elaborate and complex error handling.