Bottlenecks occur when a site cannot handle the number of user requests due to inadequate scalability, whether vertical or horizontal. Let’s address the above issues one by one.
Hardware issues
Server hardware is one of the main culprits in inadequate website traffic handling. Check that the server has enough processing power and memory.
If you use a virtual machine, admins can activate global or local CPU or RAM optimization settings as needed.
Implementing high-performance storage systems and on-demand storage scalability in the hosting environment can prevent storage bottlenecks. This measure can streamline database operations and speed up file transfers.
Bandwidth-related problems
The under-optimization of your hosting environment can manifest itself as insufficient network bandwidth.
Recent studies show that between 10 and 20% of server scalability bottlenecks worldwide are related to inadequate bandwidth.
Under-optimized environments either have too many devices connected to the network or need critical software updates. Such web hosting environments struggle to handle traffic spikes, resulting in high latency.
These issues can be solved through bandwidth throttling, which involves internet service providers intentionally slowing down their clients’ connections to prevent bottlenecks.
Inadequate hosting architecture
Bottlenecks can also occur if your server’s hosting architecture is not configured for big data transfers or lacks redundancy. For example, a 1TB dataset requires a minimum bandwidth of 200 Mbps.
Distributing the data load across multiple apps or web servers is a possible solution. Adding even one extra server to your system’s web tier increases availability by 8%.
On the other hand, even a one-second delay in page loading slashes views by 11%, while small businesses worldwide lose between $137 and $147 per minute when their servers are down.
Inefficient resource management
Server resource allocation involves distributing the server’s processing and storage resources among the running applications and tasks to guarantee uninterrupted performance.
Failing to do so would result in resource bottlenecks caused by inadequate calculation of the computing power, memory, or bandwidth an application or process may need.
Inappropriate Caching
Caching optimization can radically improve the scalability of a hosting environment. Caching brokers like Redis or Memcached can prevent system overloads caused by repetitive database queries.
Effective server-side caching reduces data retrieval times and optimizes resource usage. As a result, the end user receives faster responses to their queries.
Poor Auto-Scaling Capabilities
If the hosting environment fails to perform on-demand auto-scaling of server resources, traffic surges may cause bottlenecks.
Employing an auto-scaling system can boost the overall performance of a hosting environment.
The system will record vital metrics like CPU utilization, memory usage, queue lengths, etc., evaluate them against preset thresholds, and implement scalability when needed.
Code-related performance bottlenecks
Poorly written code can cause bottlenecks. It can cause algorithms to underperform or run too many operations simultaneously, wasting valuable server resources.
Programmers use profiling and benchmarking techniques to tackle performance bottlenecks. Profiling tools analyze runtime patterns and identify the resource-consuming sectors that require optimization.
Benchmarking tools measure the performance of your code by running specific tests and recording their execution time.
Developers can thus compare the performance of different code implementations and execute the necessary optimizations.
Shared Hosting Limitations
Shared hosting environments are more prone to bottlenecks than dedicated and cloud hosting ones.
Performance pillars such as processing power, storage capacity, and bandwidth are distributed unevenly among the server subscribers. Thus, if one site experiences a traffic surge, others may become unreachable.
This situation renders scaling practically impossible because the shared hosting environment lacks the required privacy to optimize.
Conclusion
Scalability bottlenecks occur when a hosting environment’s architecture or configuration is inadequate or improperly maintained to handle increasing traffic loads.
The most common anti-bottleneck strategies are regular server updates, code debugging, database optimization, and caching optimization. Other factors include the dynamic scaling of server resources.
If these aspects are considered, performance issues such as slow response times and system failures will never occur in your hosting environment.