Chapter 14: Improving Web Page Performance

Overview

Throughout this book, you have created countless web services that perform a wide range of operations. Depending on the processing a web service performs and the type and amount of data the programs exchange with the web service, there may be ways you can improve the web service’s performance.

To start, this chapter provides ways you can log events within your web services to create a history you can later study in order to better understand the processing the web service performs. Then, the chapter examines how caching can impact web service performance. You will learn how to control the length of time a server will maintain a web service’s output before requiring the web service to again perform its processing in order to generate a “fresh” result.

Finally, this chapter looks at ways your programs can call web service methods asynchronously, so that rather than forcing a program to suspend its processing until a method completes, the program can call a web service method and then continue its processing, in parallel with the web service. After the web service method completes its processing, the web service will signal the program by calling a specific handler (a function) within the program. The program, in turn, can then retrieve the web service’s result.