Reducing Network Congestion for Optimal App Performance

80% of consumers will delete mobile apps that fail to meet their expectations, according to the TechRepublic website. Simply put, customers tend to be fickle and are more than willing to move to greener pastures – better performing applications – if they feel the need to. The typical customer expects your mobile application not only to be secure but also be quick and convenient enough for them to use.

One factor that will greatly contribute to the abandonment of your app is experiencing lags or even sudden downtime due to network congestion. In case it takes too long for the app to respond to transactions. Your end user will either have to bear with this inconvenience or move to better services. As a result, finding ways to reduce your network congestion should be a priority in the quest to improve the performance of your applications.

Here are a few insights to reduce the lag caused by network congestion:

Commit To Monitoring Your Network

There is a lot you can tell from paying attention to the intricate details of your network performance. You can easily determine the main cause of network congestion, not to mention, bring out problems that might be waiting to happen. Use network monitoring tools to pay close attention to the network, both at the perimeter and at the endpoints.

Look for anything that might look amiss including cyber security attacks that can lead to an increase in network traffic. Sticking to other monitoring processes such as database performance monitoring will also help compliment the kind of intelligence you get from network monitoring. If something problematic is affecting your internal network from the level of the application database, pinpointing. It will be easy when working with both solutions.

Segment Your Networks

Whenever two or more computers are communicating in a network, they send messages to each other in the form of packets. In case multiple devices send their messages simultaneously. It will lead to packet collisions which often lead to the messages being distorted, not to mention the network congestion caused. By segmenting your network, you will be isolating different parts of it into stand-alone parts.

This way, you can get to limit the levels of congestion resulting from packet collisions. On the other hand, network segmentation is advantageous security wise since isolating the different parts of your application’s network. It means that hackers will have to work harder to access the data. Additionally, it will become easier to implement a “least privilege policy” using this setup.

Use Backpressure Routing

Once the throughput of a computer reaches capacity, it will most likely lead to network congestion and downtime. The trick is to use a different path to deal with the backlogged messages before you can contain the congestion. Commonly known as backpressure routing, this solution is most effective in multi-hop routing, but can also help reduce network congestions.

Use Choke Packets

In most cases, congestions will occur when the sending server or computer is sending messages faster than the receiving computer can handle. Often, this will result in packet loss or timeouts. Sadly, this will only mean losses to your organization as well as reputational damage.

The solution is to use choke packets to slow down the output of the sender and allow the receiving device enough time to catch up. Otherwise, the network congestion is only bound to get worse as your organization experiences some downtime.

Conclusion

Application downtimes that arise from network congestion should be a thing of the past in your business. It can be quite easy to reduce such congestions, and it will only require the full cooperation of your IT team. Commit to the above strategies to ensure that your end users are more than happy interacting with your application.