Application and Protocol Barriers to Application Performance

Application and Protocol Barriers to Application Performance

The performance of an application is constantly impacted by the barriers and limitations of the protocols that support the given application and the network that resides between the communicating nodes. Just because an application performs well in a lab does not always mean it will perform well in a real-world environment.

As discussed earlier in this chapter, protocols react poorly when introduced to WAN conditions such as latency, bandwidth, congestion, and packet loss. Additional factors impact application performance, such as how the common protocols consume available network bandwidth and how traffic is transferred between devices. Furthermore, other application performance barriers can be present in the endpoints themselves, from something as basic as the network card to something as complex as the block size configured for a local file system.