Background jobs or cron jobs

• Job: Independent piece of code that runs separately
• Cron job: Job that runs on regular schedule (nightly, every 10 minutes)
• Background jobs run asynchronous tasks that are too slow for the client to just wait
• Background jobs perform tasks for users (i.e. big export file) or for a system (i.e. updating photo and propagating it to the system)

Cache

• Memcache: Popular caching system

Lazy loading: Defer heavy/expensive loading/calculation

• Example: You want to remove curse words in all content. Instead of running it on all posts from the get-go; the script only runs when it is viewed.

SQL optimization

• Split across multiple tables to avoid duplication then recombined before it can be displayed by the product
• Denormalize copy of data: Improve read speeds, slower write speeds. Might affect development time b/c of bugs.

Improving performance

• Add limits: Show x features instead of all
• Change product to something that requires fewer calculations at a time
• Invest in more engineering time to accelerate processing