The State Changers held a meeting centered around improving user experience and speeding up query processes within a large survey engagement tool. Currently, the application's user interface suffers a lag due to extensive data querying from its backend, specifically on generating reports from survey questions.
The primary issue faced by the team stems from executing queries on large tables, resulting in slow responses. With each action querying millions of records, the time to execute results in a delay at the front end. The discussion pointed towards software named Xano, which proved helpful in indexing and reducing the time of query execution significantly, but the system was still slow. A major part of the meeting was dedicated to exploring caching solutions to enhance performance. The team discussed the benefits of backend caching, particularly in Xano where two types, lazy and aggressive caching, were considered helpful. Lazy caching, where caching occurs when asked, was instantly introduced to speed up the process. For an even more aggressive caching approach, it was suggested that the endpoint could be turned into a function, run as a background task, and its data put into a table. This way, when a similar query is made, the system could quickly deliver the already-stored response instead of executing the query again, thus reducing the load time. Adjusting filters and cache retrieval based on common user requests was also discussed, as it could lead to quicker data retrieval for the majority of user actions. Though this might not result in instant responses for every possible question, it was agreed that such an approach would notably improve user experience in the majority of cases, worth considering given the front-end delays. In conclusion, the team decided to experiment with Xano backend caching, indexing, and other performance improvements to address the major bottleneck in their current system. The ultimate goal is to reduce load times and improve overall user experience within the application.
(Source: Office Hours 8/4/2023 )
