Angular, created by Google, is a fantastic tool for building modern web applications. It helps you create single-page apps (SPAs) that are fast, efficient, and easy to use. You can even use it to build apps that work on your phone, tablet, or even your computer!
Angular gives you a great starting point with its organized structure. This makes it easier to write clean and maintainable code. You can easily combine different parts of your app like building blocks, making it simple to design and update your application.
Fast While Angular helps you build amazing apps, you need to pay attention to performance to make sure they load quickly and run smoothly.
- Write efficient code: Keep your code organized and use the latest features from Angular to make your app run faster.
- Optimize your build process: Make sure your app is built and deployed quickly to minimize delays.
- Monitor your app: Keep an eye on how your app is performing in the real world. This helps you identify and fix any issues that might slow it down.
By following these tips, you can create high-performance Angular apps that provide a fantastic user experience.
Issues when Determining Application Performance and Load Times
Since Angular is a modern typescript-based framework that offers dynamic web pages, it provides some challenges in monitoring its performance and load time. It is troublesome to accurately measure when new content is rendered on the page because SPAs do not trigger new navigation in the browser once the web page has loaded. Therefore, HTTP-monitoring tools (and also API monitoring tools) will not provide significant metrics to optimize load times since Angular does not trigger new browser requests to the server.
Additionally, despite that HTTP responses determine the result of a request sent by a web page, they fall short in grasping true load times when embedded JavaScript files and associated resources are parsed, executed and rendered until users can fully interact with the page. It is necessary to have a different approach on how to test and monitor the JavaScript events in the browser in order to receive accurate load times from the client side.
Tools to Optimize Load Times
Angular offers a list of tools and techniques that can help reduce an application’s load time and monitor its performance over time, especially after an application has scaled large enough to deal with multiple heavy computations. Some of those techniques that can help decrease an application’s initial load time and speed up page navigation are Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compilation, code-splitting and preloading modules. We’ll discuss these techniques in more detail.
Ahead-of-Time Compilation
There are two main ways to compile an Angular application: Just-in-Time (JiT), which compiles the application in the web browser at runtime and Ahead-of-Time (AoT), which as the name states, compiles the application at build time. The AoT compiler assembles the HTML and TypeScript code during the build process before the web browser downloads it.
It helps to quicken the rendering process by considerably reducing the time the application takes to bootstrap. In this way, the web browser loads executable code allowing it to render the application instantly without needing to wait for the application to compile. Moreover, the pre-compiled code reduces the number of asynchronous requests to external sources by adding those resources, like HTML templates and external CSS, inside the app. Thus, the compiled code mitigates the separate AJAX requests to those files. Therefore, the user experience becomes smoother and faster.
Code-splitting
In short, code-splitting separates the application’s JavaScript bundles in a way the it does not risk the applications features. It maintains control over the main JavaScript code during initial loading time. Code-splitting can be done at different levels within the application, such as through entry points, dynamically loaded modules and shared code with the help of SplitChunksPlugin while preventing code duplication.
There are two main approaches to code-splitting in an Angular app: component level code-splitting and route level code-splitting. The main difference between the two approaches is that component level code-splitting loads individual components lazily, even without a route navigation, while route level code-splitting loads individual routes lazily. In any case, both approaches can be test considering the app’s TTI (Time to Interactive). TTI is a great performance indicator to compare against since it measures how much time it takes an application to be responsive. In other words, how long it takes the application to load so the user can interact with it.
Preloading Modules
Preloading modules is a technique offered in Angular applications that allows the modules to be loaded as soon as possible following established rules. Modules can be preloaded all at the same time, when a particular event occurs or just a selected few depending on the circumstances. Developers have the possibility of checking how much time it takes for a module to load and the inherent value of using a preloading strategy. Preloading modules in Angular is quite similar to lazy loading except that the applications modules are loaded right after all the eager loaded modules have successfully loaded. In this manner, possible latency is discarded when the user navigates to a lazy loaded module while still benefiting of a quicker initial loading of the application because its initial modules are loaded first.
Angular’s default preloading strategies are PreloadAllModules and NoPreloading. The first means that all lazy-loadable modules are preloaded while the latter disables any preloading. In the case of using PreloadAllModules, applications could potentially face a bottleneck if the application has a large number of modules. It is then when considering a custom preloading strategy could be beneficial.
The concept of using a custom preloading strategy might make more sense in an enterprise scenario. For example, preloading first the most expensive modules over those that are less resource expensive could be an approach that developers could use. Moreover, the moment in which modules are preloaded also has an important role in reducing load times.
Load Testing your Angular Applications with LoadView
LoadView proposes an innovative and holistic solution to approach the limitations of HTTP-monitoring tools and strengthen the tools Angular developers have today to control, monitor and optimize their applications on the client side. LoadView is a cloud-based load-testing platform that offers stress test monitoring of websites, web applications, and APIs by simulating thousands of concurrent connections in real time, helping to identify bottlenecks and verify overall performance.
After creating an account, developers can test their websites and web applications by creating a device, which stores the website or application to be tested. By choosing the Website option, Angular developers can test the initial load time of their application’s landing or login page by configuring a scenario where thousands of users are concurrently trying to access the page. On the other hand, by choosing the Web Application option, Angular developers can script and test load time of specific use cases of their application.
For example, filling out a form, navigating through in-application routes, sorting loaded data from the server and, in general, measure the TTI of their app. LoadView lets users personalize their test load type in three different ways along with an execution plan that sets up how many connections to establish over a period. In addition, LoadView takes a step further by having the possibility to arrange the geographical distribution of the virtual users connected to the website.
LoadView offers engineers an efficient and cost-effective way to automate the load testing process compared to traditional methods. No more costly investments and time-consuming processes. Developers and testers don’t have to worry about staying within allocated budgets and setting up infrastructure. They can focus on what they do best, and that’s executing tests. With real browser-based testing, results and insights are tied directly into user journeys, ensuring your applications can stand up to peak load scenarios.
Finally, LoadView has the capacity to show full in-depth reports of the results of a simulation. It can show a graphical representation of the scenarios execution plan for establishing virtual user connections, the average response time per user and the number of errors per session that occurred while performing the scenario. These charts and performance data give the opportunity to look into detailed information of a particular moment of the simulation to obtain important insight on the load time of every element that was rendered to the page. This is extremely beneficial for Angular applications since it allows developers to take action upon specific elements that may be delaying an app’s TTI. In this sense, LoadView fills that void in accurately testing and monitoring JavaScript events to test load time on the client side, and thus, becoming a powerful asset that front-end developers should have under their belt.
Conclusion: Angular Web Application Performance
Today’s users expect web apps to load instantly. That’s why Angular developers need to focus on speed! Techniques like Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation and code splitting can significantly improve how quickly your app loads. But speed isn’t just about initial loading. You also need to make sure your app stays fast and responsive even when lots of people are using it. That’s where LoadView comes in. LoadView lets you simulate real user traffic and identify any performance bottlenecks. It’s like a stress test for your app, helping you ensure it can handle the load.
Once your app is live, you need to keep an eye on its performance to make sure it’s always running smoothly. That’s where Dotcom-Monitor comes in. It continuously monitors your app from real browsers, just like real users would. You’ll get instant alerts if anything goes wrong and detailed reports to help you pinpoint any performance issues. The best part? If you’ve already used LoadView to test your app, you can easily use those same test scripts with Dotcom-Monitor. It’s like having a one-two punch for app performance!
Ready to get started?
- Try LoadView for free: Sign up for a free trial and get up to 5 free load tests to see how your Angular app performs under pressure.
- Experience Dotcom-Monitor: Give our web application monitoring solution a try and ensure your app stays fast and reliable for all your users.