Understanding the Big Picture (AKA How Programs Use Your Web Service)

It’s almost impossible to find an application for which you cannot improve performance. That said, the challenge becomes identifying where (which methods) you should focus your efforts as you begin your performance-tuning efforts. Programmers often speak in terms of the 80/20 rule, which states that 80 percent of the processing that your program performs occurs within 20 percent of the code. If you consider a word-processing program, for example, which provides many different capabilities, you will find that users spend the majority of their time simply typing text. Periodically, a user may spell-check, save, or print a document. But 80 percent (or more) of the user’s interaction with the word processor uses less than 20 percent of the word processor’s code.

If you wanted to improve the word processor’s performance, it would not make sense to start with seldom used operations (such as the thesaurus or table-formatting tools). Instead, you might study ways you can speed up the keyboard or video operations that the word processor uses for most operations.

Several of the web services you have created through this book offer a number of methods. As you begin to monitor how users (programs actually) use your web service, you will likely find that the programs use some methods much more often than others. Before you spend time fine-tuning your web service code, you should monitor the service’s use so that you can begin your efforts with the code that is most frequently used.