How to Address AEM Back-End Performance Issues And Positively Impact Your Website

What’s the point of an outstanding website design and well-crafted user experience if your back end can’t handle all those intricate features?

AEM allows you to create great front-end implementations and design. Check ✔. However, a strong back end has to support them, for every additional second of delay on the back end can result in a blank screen, functional errors, slow page speed — and, worse yet — visitors leaving your site.

Adobe Experience Manager back-end performance requires fine-tuning.

Our previous article highlighted the top 9 website page speed issues on the front end. Now, our AEM implementation experts would like to examine Adobe Experience Manager back-end performance issues—and ways to fix them.

Address AEM Back-End Performance Issues And Get your Servers Running Like Clockwork

Action 1. Configure the Server

Adobe Experience Manager is a complicated system of interconnected components. Some components will inevitably work well, while others will lag behind. Each component requires processing power drawn from the server’s capacity.

On the server side, high central processing unit (CPU) consumption and memory issues can negatively impact AEM back-end performance.

Ensure CPU and memory resources are properly allocated for your project and content needs. After analyzing your CPU and memory consumption data, you can decide whether to scale up the server capacity or optimize the existing code.

Fine-Tune Background Processes

95% of the time, your server does something users are unaware of. Responses to web requests are prepared, new content is published, obsolete data is backed up or retired, binary storage is compactified or maintained, and external data is imported.

These actions often happen simultaneously. They consume much of the server’s resources, which ultimately causes AEM back-end performance issues.

Action 2. Use AEM Best Programming Practices

Lack of coding experience can provoke AEM back-end issues and make rookie programmers stumble now and then.

• Use separate non-AEM-based services for massive data writes or updates, such as user profiles, user reactions, or bookmarking.
• Avoid putting too many separate components on a single page. Doing so will lead to poor web performance in authoring mode.
• Don’t stuff the entire initialization logic into the back-end page rendering process while slowing down loading. Let your markup be lightweight and basic so that each subsequent request from the same user loads new data or content when scrolling further down.
• Close connections and sessions that aren’t running anymore and set limits to their runtime.
• Instead of @Inject, use specific injector annotations such as @ValueMapValue when applying Sling models.

Action 3. Sustain Corrective Maintenance and Keep Your Data ‘Clean’

AEM back-end performance issues result from files overfilled with chaotic data entries. If ignored, stored files, history logs, and resource versions will consume vast amounts of storage space.

Runtime AEM configurations let you change certain aspects of Adobe Experience Manager on the fly. Runtime AEM configurations can include:

• Changes to log levels
• Debugging settings
• Database connections
• Cache settings
• Enabling or disabling specific features or modules and
• Other aspects of AEM environments

To reduce AEM backend issues, runtime AEM configuration makes real-time adjustments possible without restarting the entire system or creating unwanted disruptions.

Finally, to keep AEM back-end performance intact, don’t let excessive processes steal your CPU power! Make sure you remove obsolete data and establish backups specifically for the important data..

Action 4. Set Up the Right Caching

Inaccurate caching can cause AEM back-end performance issues. Bad caching at large can:

• Shake up website page speed
• Display outdated content to users
• Cause users to see inconsistent versions of a web page

On the other hand, AEM often needs multi-level data caching. Multi-level data caching helps address the growing internet traffic coming to your site and process different queries and processing efficiently. Caching happens on several levels:

• Inside a single web server
• Inside the cluster of production servers and
• At the CDN level

If multi-level caching has a sloppy implementation, you’ll have trouble dumping outdated data or, worse, find it next to impossible to remove it manually.

Once you fine-tune caching, you can mitigate data flow interruptions between third-party integrations and the site. Additionally, proper caching allows you to update or replace system components without shutting anything down or causing significant downtime.

Avoid excessive use of URLs coming with query parameters. Query parameters are inserted into URLs to pass information to the server, customize responses, filter data, and track user interactions. Requests to fetch parameterized URLs often bypass caching and go straight to the server, which leads to:

• Increased server load
• Slower response times
• Higher bandwidth usage and
• Inconsistent content delivery

To make caching smooth, use selectors and suffixes as an alternative to query parameters. If you use in-memory cache(-s) like Guava’s or EhCache, design the eviction policy.

Finally, when choosing a content delivery network (CDN) to serve website pages faster to different geolocations, establish a reasonable cache eviction policy to always supply up-to-date content versions.

Action 5. Examine Back-End Queries and Index Them Properly

Java Content Repository (JCR) is used to access web contents and other hierarchically stored data in AEM. The JCR data structure resembles a document tree with nodes and data. One of the best practices is to create indexes for fast data retrieval from the repository.

When an AEM web page is rendered, it may trigger a data query. If a frequent data query is not backed by an index, the page rendering time rises considerably.

Additionally, large full-text indexes that cover multiple properties can cause back-end performance issues, as they consume significant disk space and perform less efficiently than smaller indexes.

Check your Lucene indices which enable efficient searching and retrieval of text data. Regularly review the board of queries that took too long to process to ensure that popular queries have been index-covered. But even if they are, indices can easily become corrupt and can underperform. If you have any suspicions or evidence of index corruption, reindex queries manually to address this AEM back-end performance issue.

Action 6. Understand Third-Party Integrations and Their Limitations

Your website may perform flawlessly when run in a development environment. However, once out in the wild West, you’ll wonder why you’re inundated with AEM back-end performance issues.

On the back end, you integrate your site with product catalogs, client relation systems, databases, and other data storage capabilities. On the front end, you embed analytics, feedback forms, chats, and more.

Yet, poor integration choices and careless implementation can harm your Adobe Experience Manager website once it goes live.

See if backup data sources and caching third-party data are done on-site once bottlenecks arise.

On the front end, check if third-party scripts load asynchronously and only on the pages where they are actually needed. Defer side scripts run on the user’s browser so that you let the essential scripts load first.

Action 7. Keep Your Tech Stack Up to Date

The technological landscape has evolved rapidly over the years. For example, comparing early 2000s browsers to those of today reveals significant improvements. Modern internet browsers are far more efficient at running code, thanks to advanced frameworks and libraries.

Yet many projects fail to keep their AEM codebase up to date, even those developed as recently as 2021.

Choosing the right core technology stack can prevent numerous AEM back-end issues and ensure efficient delivery of website content to users.

• Decide between back-end or front-end rendering
• Use componentized pages or Content Fragments
• Apply standard content delivery, Edge Delivery Services, or others

Choose the technology stack that better fits the business and target audience. Strike a balance between old tricks and new trends.

Follow new version announcements for your framework of choice and upgrade it accordingly. Avoid using legacy modules in new codebases and web pages.

Solve Those AEM Back-End Issues!

Knowing these AEM back-end performance issues and addressing them appropriately can save you time and budget. By making the most out of back-end optimization, you stay in control of your digital experience strategy and ensure your systems serve your employees’ and customers’ needs better, faster, and in more meaningful ways.