You have created an awesome application and you know it will be used by a large number of people. As word spreads about your app you will acquire an even larger user base. Somehow you need to make sure that your user experience stays consistent for all of your users as the amount of people using it increases. Here are a few things you will probably want to consider.

Hardware

Will you be able to upgrade your servers easily and quickly enough to cope with an increasing number of users and requests without significant downtime or issues? Amazon’s Elastic Cloud offers a solution to this that is relatively cheap and efficient. You can upgrade virtual servers easily when you need to. The smallest instances make for good startup servers and once you require more processing power you can simply upgrade to the next step. The solution is also flexible because you only pay for what you use.

Caching

Your application has some data that gets retrieved from the database quite often, but it isn’t updated very much. Instead of hitting the database each time this data is required, use an ORM with second-level caching capabilities so the data can be retrieved without asking the database for it every time you need it. A good Java-based solution is Hibernate. It is easily implementable and also a breeze to develop with.

Requests

Passing in a lot of data or the whole object model can be attractive, but due to the speed of the development cycle it is not always optimum. Keep your methods very specific so that the amount of data being transferred between clients and servers is kept to a minimum. This will help your users always have a responsive feel when using the application.

Other points

Sharing a load between multiple servers will be a key factor in many larger applications. Requests can be handled quickly when a lot of users are using the application at once. Use technologies like the Spring framework that will cause your service layers to be created once and not on each individual request. In conjunction with connection pooling, this can become a very efficient way to keep processing to a minimum.

Keeping these things in mind when developing your application will be an immense help later on and will give you more time to create some more incredible applications.