Design Upgrade X1: performance , cold starts in cloud and tools

In this article we will look in to finetuning aspects of application design which are different from horizontal and vertical scaling.  

Use case is my portal www.talash.azurewebsites.net    where loading time for landing page is around 19 sec. and reduced to 500ms.

How to fine tune and optimize loading time depends on application. But there are general guide lines to achieve it as well. Like db indexing, multi threading / multi tasking , avoiding sync calls. Once we follow best coding practices above few things can be achieve. But in the above use case still I am getting 19sec as response time for the landing page. I started looking at what else required to achieve better performance. Come across "cold starts" and added latency in cloud. Try to avoid high resolution pictures in landing page  and used Cloudanary to get some help from CDN aspect and then Cache design for Graphql calls. and other techniques working as expected. Let us get in to more details of each technique and use case .

Check List: 

ref: How to Conquer Cold Starts for Better Performance - The New Stack

1. Deploy your function as a .zip (compressed) package. Minimize its size by removing unneeded files and dependencies, such as debug symbols (.pdb files) and unnecessary image files.

1. For Windows deployment, run your functions from a package file. To do this, use the WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE=1 app setting. If your app uses Azure Storage to store content, deploy Azure Storage in the same region as your Azure Functions app and consider using premium storage for a faster cold start.

1. When deploying .NET apps, publish with ReadyToRun to avoid additional costs from the JIT compiler.

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to your function app. Go to Diagnose and solve problems, and review any messages that appear under Risk alerts. Look for issues that may impact cold starts.

1. If your app uses an Azure Functions Premium or App Service plan, invoke warmup triggers to preload dependencies or add custom logic required to connect to external endpoints. (This option isn’t supported for apps on consumption plans.)

1. Try the “always ready instances” feature in our newest hosting option for event-driven serverless functions, Flex Consumption, which is in early access preview. This plan supports long function execution times and includes private networking, instance size selection, concurrency control, and fast and large scale-out features on a serverless model.