Application performance/speed is a feature that’s incredibly valuable. Think about it: if a website or SaaS application performs slowly on a regular basis you’re much more likely to start evaluating other options. For a complex, multi-tenant web app the number of moving parts grows over time making consistent, fast performance more and more challenging.
Here are some items to consider doing on a regular basis:
- Evaluate raw database size on the filesystem as well as number of rows in the 10 largest tables (e.g. take a snapshot of this in a table or manually put the values in a Google Spreadsheet once per month)
- Track the amount of time it takes to complete nightly background jobs and record it on a regular basis for time series analytics
- Incorporate in-app tools to measure database query execution time as well as log slow queries
- Measure the page load time of the 25 most important user functions with real browser checks using Rigor.com, or a similar tool, on a daily basis
One of the key factors is measuring the rate of change and growth over time — it’s best to get out of front of potential speed issues rather than deal with them when they arrive. Application performance is a feature and needs to treated as such.
What else? What are some other items to consider for application performance over time for startups?
David Cummings on Startups 
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