Faster than a Speeding Bullet

Boy, did Clark Kent outsmart that bullet.

We all know it was all special effects. But done well, he looks superfast.

That’s how it is with applications. User experience is the only true metric.?

That holding true, looking fast is as important as being fast.

A clever application knows how to appear a lot faster than it really is while still delivering reliable performance.

If the user thinks the ride is first class, then ignorance is bliss.

?Emails

The key to looking fast is to postpone everything that can be postponed. What can be done last, do last. What can be relegated to the background should be taken offstage.

My favorite example is a contact form that requires the site to get back to you with an immediate email.

The standard method is to process the email once the form is filled and the user hits the send button.?

In an ideal world, the email is sent right away, and in a second the user will see the confirmation message.

What happens when the server is having a bad day? There could be heavy load, a bad network, or a freeze somewhere in the system. What usually takes a second now takes 15 and the user is getting frustrated waiting for a confirmation.

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A simple trick is to postpone the final conformation to the end. The moment the user hits send, a message appears saying “Message received.”

Once the email has been sent, a new message appears directing the user to check their inbox. In the eyes of the user, the transaction happened instantly.

It doesn’t matter how long it took to complete. ?

What I Do?

The true engine of the application is the database. The database takes your requests for anything and presents it to you at the User Interface (UI).

I have a few tricks up my sleeve to make it look smooth and sleek.

First are updating automatic indexes. Whenever a user makes a request for information from my database, I put an index between his browser and RavenDB to guarantee faster performance.

But what happens when a document, or a batch of documents are written into the database and the index needs to be updated?

That is a task for the backstage area.

What’s the point of having an index if you spend as much time keeping it current as you do using it?

Keeping a task like this one, and many others asynchronous from the direct user to data lane makes RavenDB look faster and users a lot happier. ?

Superman may have been faster than a speeding bullet, but I am able to leap huge queries in a single bound.

Oren Eini?is the CEO of?RavenDB, a NoSQL Distributed Database, and RavenDB Cloud, its?Managed Cloud Service?(DBaaS). Oren is a Microsoft MVP and a DZone Hall of Famer with over 3.5 million views over ten years writing about NoSQL Database Technology, the .NET Ecosystem, and Software Development. He has been blogging for more than 15 years using his alias?Ayende Rahien.

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