FACTORS OF POOR SOFTWARE PERFORMANCE

There are a number of factors that can contribute to poor software performance, undermining the user experience and hindering the efficiency of an application — for example:

1. Inefficient algorithms and data structures can lead to excessive computational overhead, causing sluggish response times.
2. Insufficient resource management, such as inefficient memory usage, can lead to memory leaks and slow performance.
3. Inadequate database design and query optimization can result in slow data retrieval and processing.
4. Poorly written code, lacking in optimizations or laden with bottlenecks, can also significantly impact performance.

SELF-HEALING

Self-healing mechanisms have become increasingly crucial in modern software development. In today's complex and dynamic software ecosystems, applications are expected to run continuously and adapt to changing conditions.

Self-healing enables software to automatically detect and address issues like system failures, resource constraints, or performance degradation without human intervention. By proactively identifying and resolving problems, self-healing can reduce downtime and maintain optimal performance levels, allowing apps to deliver a seamless user experience even when errors may occur. With an extensive list of selfhealing patterns and techniques available, we wanted to see which methods are being used most commonly.

We asked: Which of the following approaches to self-healing have you implemented?

Observations:

1. The most common approach to implementing self-healing in software was "Retry" (49%), followed by "Failover" (48%) and "Circuit breaker" (48%), with each approach being selected by about half of respondents. 78% of respondents said they have implemented at least one of these three approaches, 48% said they have implemented at least two of the three approaches, and 19% said they have implemented all three approaches — roughly as much, or more, as the response rate for several individual items.

   These top approaches are generally more abstract than most of the other options provided, and they may owe their popularity to their common-sense nature.

2. The "Retry" approach suggests that if a failure occurs, try again and see if the result is the same.
3. The "Circuit breaker" pattern proposes that if the failure continues to occur, stop retrying so that resources can be freed and waiting processes can resume.
4. And the "Failover" approach advises that a back-up system be in place that can take over responsibilities in the event that the primary system fails. These are methods used not just in software development but also in everyday problem-solving.

Additionally, while these approaches can be implemented on a system-wide level, they are also relatively easier to implement by individual developers in smaller sections of code (e.g., employing retries and a circuit breaker within a method or function to help ensure it is able to return appropriately).