Troubleshooting Backend Performance

I used to think that performance of the backend depends on the application logic itself. However, there are many other factors that play a role in overall quality and performance of the application. Networking, connection establishment, security, backend communication, protocol serialization, intermediaries and much more.

Often debugging the app if you have the source code allows the developer to zone in to the problem and identify it, However most of the time as an engineer you either don’t have access to the source code or its time consuming to debug a complex app. That is why in this course I present you with some tools I use to analyze the backend application performance and provide a good guess and what might be the problem without stepping in the code. Often known as black box testing.

If your application is a web application that is consumable through a browser, devtools allow us to pretty much inspect all traffic going out from the app and can tell us so much about the app. If the app is not available in the browser we will then demonstrate MITM proxy which is a proxy that intercepts HTTP traffic and log it, this way we can inspect requests and see which of those are the culprit. Finally, if the app uses a protocol that isn’t HTTP intercepting it with a proxy becomes little tricky, so we will use both tcpdump and Wireshark to capture low level packets and see our requests this way.

This course is designed for developers and engineers who have built backend and frontend applications and would like to take their skills further. This course is intermediate to advanced and it is recommended that students have a background in networking and backend fundamentals both of which I have courses for.