Measure Everything

Introduction

We now have the tools and knowledge to build a real-time application using Phoenix Channels. However, we will need to run this application for actual users to be valid. Our application needs to operate efficiently so that requests do not time out, encounter errors, or otherwise not work correctly.

This section looks at several common scaling challenges and best practices to help avoid performance issues as we develop and ship our application. We’re covering these topics before we build an application because it’s essential to consider them at the design stage of the development process and not after the application is written.

The following performance pitfalls are a collection of common problems affecting applications. We’ll experience many other challenges when building and shipping an application, but we’ll focus on these three because they apply to all real-time applications.

Unknown application health

We need to know if our deployed application is healthy. When our application experiences a problem, we can identify the root cause by looking at all of our metrics. We’ll ...