Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 4

In 2013, APMdigest published a list called 15 Top Factors That Impact Application Performance. Even today, this is one of the most popular pieces of content on the site. And for good reason – the whole concept of Application Performance Management (APM) starts with identifying the factors that impact application performance, and then doing something about it. However, in the fast moving world of IT, many aspects of application performance have changed in the 3 years since the list was published. And many new experts have come on the scene. So APMdigest is updating the list for 2016, and you will be surprised how much it has changed.

Start with Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 1

Start with Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 2

Start with Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 3

Part 4 of this list covers the application itself.

20. APP COMPLEXITY

The top factor that impacts application performance today is application complexity. Modern day applications are spidery, with thousand of possible optimization points. It's a huge amount of complexity to deal with. It becomes very hard to predict performance ahead of time, and to understand the implications of a software change. Companies need to have real data derived from real-life test scenarios, and need to measure true end-to-end key performance indicators (KPIs) affecting the user experience.
Paola Moretto
Founder and CEO, Nouvola

21. APP DESIGN

The top factor that impacts application performance is the architecture of the application itself. Often times you see this when an application is moved or migrated to another environment. For example, the impact of a "chatty" application can be hidden or mitigated on a high speed local LAN, but once moved to the cloud, the slower telecom speeds expose this design flaw in the form of high latency.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Application design/architecture/complexity is the top factor that impacts application performance. It can be quite difficult to mitigate the effects of poor design, even with a great deal of additional work. Poorly designed applications may suffer from poor performance even with relatively low traffic.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica

Developing apps while looking only from a functionality perspective is one of the most fundamental mistakes in developing applications. You should design your application also from a performance perspective if you want to make sure you deliver a good application. Do this right from the start of the project and you will deliver a much better application. Ignoring this and trying to optimize the performance afterwards is very expensive and doesn't deliver the correct results.
Coen Meerbeek
Online Performance Consultant and Founder of Blue Factory Internet

Application architecture – which is part science and part art. There are definitely MANY factors we see impact performance, everything from infrastructure to poor coding to a badly designed database. But fixing these implementation aspects of a poorly architected application can be like chasing your tail, and bad design decisions can haunt you for the life of the application. Applications are complex, often comprised of shared services and deployed on shared infrastructure. The science is in understanding the relationships and interactions between the various components, and the art is in doing so without sacrificing user experience.
Dave Murphy
SVP Delivery, SOASTA

22. APP DESIGN: NEW FEATURES

Applications that perform well have to be built effectively and tested meticulously. As such, the biggest impact on application performance is new features. As developers introduce new code, overall performance is affected. Due to schedule pressures, there is often no time remaining to optimize performance. Balancing the demands of time to market and application performance is a requirement for all members of the development, ops, and executive teams.
Don Griffin
Director of Engineering, Sencha

23. APP DESIGN: LATENCY

Ignoring latency in application design: Chatty applications that require significant communication or synchronization with other components over a network need to be designed with WAN latency in mind. Multi-step communication over the network may work fine in a low-latency LAN environment, but it can become a critical time bottleneck over a higher-latency WAN or over the Internet. Add cloud services with worldwide distribution to this mix, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Kimberley Parsons Trommler
Product Evangelist, Paessler AG

24. APP DESIGN: IO PATH

The top factor affecting distributed/clustered applications performance is the inability to secure an entire application IO path from compute to storage – leading to unpredicted performance and incapability to guaranty SLA. This often also results in a poor man's solution – underutilized servers reflected in siloed applications' resources to guarantee availability, usually in a multi-tenant environment. Containers reflect the next generation virtualization solution designed to take on significant chunk of the challenge. By taking a holistic application centric approach, IO path from compute to storage resource availability can be guaranteed amongst other entire application lifecycle ops.
Razi Sharir
VP of Products, Robin Systems

25. APP DESIGN: BUGS

There are many different types of software bugs, all of which can impact software performance. For C/C++ programmers, common bugs include execution state corruption, data structure corruption, race conditions, deadlocks and memory leaks. These bugs can appear regularly in software development. However, they can also appear intermittently, thus unintentionally getting into shipped products. These types of bugs cause the biggest headaches for software vendors, who have to attempt to reproduce an issue their customer is experiencing but often without the issue appearing on the vendor's test systems. In each case, programmers are unaware of, or misunderstood, their contract with the rest of the system. Fundamentally, even in well-developed software, bugs occur because people don't understand what their software really does.
Greg Law
CEO, Undo

26. APP DESIGN: SECURITY

I think application performance is a huge subject but with what the world of software is going through today a lot has to do with security. I believe that the ability to deliver applications which have been developed with security in mind from the start will have a significant impact on the final delivery. An application which is developed with security in mind has less chance to expose user's personal data and therefore less chance of being taken down by the vendor. High programing quality is not only the speed but also the quality of the code and quality includes secure code.
Amit Ashbel
Cyber Security Evangelist, Checkmarx

Read Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 5, the final installment of the list of top factors that impact application performance.

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Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 4

In 2013, APMdigest published a list called 15 Top Factors That Impact Application Performance. Even today, this is one of the most popular pieces of content on the site. And for good reason – the whole concept of Application Performance Management (APM) starts with identifying the factors that impact application performance, and then doing something about it. However, in the fast moving world of IT, many aspects of application performance have changed in the 3 years since the list was published. And many new experts have come on the scene. So APMdigest is updating the list for 2016, and you will be surprised how much it has changed.

Start with Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 1

Start with Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 2

Start with Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 3

Part 4 of this list covers the application itself.

20. APP COMPLEXITY

The top factor that impacts application performance today is application complexity. Modern day applications are spidery, with thousand of possible optimization points. It's a huge amount of complexity to deal with. It becomes very hard to predict performance ahead of time, and to understand the implications of a software change. Companies need to have real data derived from real-life test scenarios, and need to measure true end-to-end key performance indicators (KPIs) affecting the user experience.
Paola Moretto
Founder and CEO, Nouvola

21. APP DESIGN

The top factor that impacts application performance is the architecture of the application itself. Often times you see this when an application is moved or migrated to another environment. For example, the impact of a "chatty" application can be hidden or mitigated on a high speed local LAN, but once moved to the cloud, the slower telecom speeds expose this design flaw in the form of high latency.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Application design/architecture/complexity is the top factor that impacts application performance. It can be quite difficult to mitigate the effects of poor design, even with a great deal of additional work. Poorly designed applications may suffer from poor performance even with relatively low traffic.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica

Developing apps while looking only from a functionality perspective is one of the most fundamental mistakes in developing applications. You should design your application also from a performance perspective if you want to make sure you deliver a good application. Do this right from the start of the project and you will deliver a much better application. Ignoring this and trying to optimize the performance afterwards is very expensive and doesn't deliver the correct results.
Coen Meerbeek
Online Performance Consultant and Founder of Blue Factory Internet

Application architecture – which is part science and part art. There are definitely MANY factors we see impact performance, everything from infrastructure to poor coding to a badly designed database. But fixing these implementation aspects of a poorly architected application can be like chasing your tail, and bad design decisions can haunt you for the life of the application. Applications are complex, often comprised of shared services and deployed on shared infrastructure. The science is in understanding the relationships and interactions between the various components, and the art is in doing so without sacrificing user experience.
Dave Murphy
SVP Delivery, SOASTA

22. APP DESIGN: NEW FEATURES

Applications that perform well have to be built effectively and tested meticulously. As such, the biggest impact on application performance is new features. As developers introduce new code, overall performance is affected. Due to schedule pressures, there is often no time remaining to optimize performance. Balancing the demands of time to market and application performance is a requirement for all members of the development, ops, and executive teams.
Don Griffin
Director of Engineering, Sencha

23. APP DESIGN: LATENCY

Ignoring latency in application design: Chatty applications that require significant communication or synchronization with other components over a network need to be designed with WAN latency in mind. Multi-step communication over the network may work fine in a low-latency LAN environment, but it can become a critical time bottleneck over a higher-latency WAN or over the Internet. Add cloud services with worldwide distribution to this mix, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Kimberley Parsons Trommler
Product Evangelist, Paessler AG

24. APP DESIGN: IO PATH

The top factor affecting distributed/clustered applications performance is the inability to secure an entire application IO path from compute to storage – leading to unpredicted performance and incapability to guaranty SLA. This often also results in a poor man's solution – underutilized servers reflected in siloed applications' resources to guarantee availability, usually in a multi-tenant environment. Containers reflect the next generation virtualization solution designed to take on significant chunk of the challenge. By taking a holistic application centric approach, IO path from compute to storage resource availability can be guaranteed amongst other entire application lifecycle ops.
Razi Sharir
VP of Products, Robin Systems

25. APP DESIGN: BUGS

There are many different types of software bugs, all of which can impact software performance. For C/C++ programmers, common bugs include execution state corruption, data structure corruption, race conditions, deadlocks and memory leaks. These bugs can appear regularly in software development. However, they can also appear intermittently, thus unintentionally getting into shipped products. These types of bugs cause the biggest headaches for software vendors, who have to attempt to reproduce an issue their customer is experiencing but often without the issue appearing on the vendor's test systems. In each case, programmers are unaware of, or misunderstood, their contract with the rest of the system. Fundamentally, even in well-developed software, bugs occur because people don't understand what their software really does.
Greg Law
CEO, Undo

26. APP DESIGN: SECURITY

I think application performance is a huge subject but with what the world of software is going through today a lot has to do with security. I believe that the ability to deliver applications which have been developed with security in mind from the start will have a significant impact on the final delivery. An application which is developed with security in mind has less chance to expose user's personal data and therefore less chance of being taken down by the vendor. High programing quality is not only the speed but also the quality of the code and quality includes secure code.
Amit Ashbel
Cyber Security Evangelist, Checkmarx

Read Top Factors That Impact Application Performance 2016 - Part 5, the final installment of the list of top factors that impact application performance.

Related Links

The Latest

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...