Find Every Bottleneck Before Users Do
A full-stack performance audit across backend APIs, database queries, and frontend rendering. Three days to identify your top 20 bottlenecks, ranked by user impact, with a prioritised optimisation roadmap.
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A performance audit provides the baseline you need before any optimisation investment. Without a structured diagnosis, engineering teams optimise the layer they understand best — usually not the one causing the most user pain. We analyse the full request path from browser through API to database, rank every bottleneck by user-facing latency impact, and produce a roadmap that tells your team exactly what to fix first.
The most common audit finding is that database queries account for 60–80% of P99 latency — but the application code and frontend team have been iterating on optimisations in their own layers without measurable user impact. A structured bottleneck ranking redirects engineering effort to where it has the highest return.
The three-day timeline is designed to deliver a complete, actionable diagnosis without extended access or extensive instrumentation overhead. We work with your existing monitoring tools where possible and add lightweight temporary profiling where gaps exist. The output is a roadmap your team can execute independently, or the starting point for a targeted optimisation engagement.
Engagement Phases
Instrumentation & Data Collection
We connect to your APM tooling, pull 30 days of trace data, and run Lighthouse audits on critical user journeys. We instrument missing layers with temporary profiling (pprof, py-spy, async-profiler) and pull database slow query logs and EXPLAIN ANALYZE outputs for your top 50 queries.
Bottleneck Analysis
We analyse traces to identify latency contributors at each layer: application code (hot functions, blocking I/O), database (N+1 queries, missing indexes, lock contention), network (serialisation overhead, payload size), and frontend (render-blocking resources, oversized bundles, LCP candidates). We rank every finding by user-facing latency impact.
Roadmap Delivery
We present a top-20 bottleneck report with severity, estimated latency reduction, and implementation effort for each finding. We produce a phased optimisation roadmap with quick wins (Day 1 fixes), medium-term improvements (1–2 sprint items), and architectural recommendations.
Deliverables
Before & After
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Bottlenecks identified | Unknown | Top 20 ranked |
| P99 latency root cause | 800 ms, no diagnosis | Root cause identified |
| Optimisation roadmap | None | Prioritised with effort |
Tools We Use
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need access to production systems?
Read-only access to your APM tool and database monitoring is sufficient for the audit. We do not need code access or production write permissions. If your monitoring coverage is limited, we may ask to instrument a staging environment for the profiling phase.
What if we don't have an APM tool?
We can work from logs, database slow query logs, and browser performance data if no APM tool is in place. We will also include APM tool recommendations in the deliverables — investing in observability is typically the highest-leverage first step before any optimisation work.
How is this different from running Lighthouse ourselves?
Lighthouse covers frontend performance in isolation. Our audit covers the full request path from browser through CDN, load balancer, application server, database, and back. A Lighthouse score of 95 is consistent with a P99 API latency of 2 seconds — the frontend and backend problems are different problems requiring different tools.
Your P99 Deserves Better
Book a free 30-minute performance scope call with our engineers. We review your latency profile, identify the most impactful optimization target, and scope a sprint to fix it.
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