How can an AngularJS development company optimize your app?

When it comes to scaling an app, there may be some performance issues. However, an app built using AngularJS can be optimized for enhanced performance by employing the right solutions.

Here are a few ways by which an AngularJS development company can optimize your app when you start to scale it:

AngularJS development company

Reducing watchers

One of the main reasons resulting in slow performance of an AngularJS app is a large number of watchers. AngularJS makes use of dirty checking to inspect the state of the app by evaluating every watcher and applying changes in the digest cycle. More number of watchers leads to longer digest cycle. For cycles over 16ms, the UI becomes sluggish. If you want to maintain 60fps in your app, 16ms is the maximum length.

The main examples of when the watchers are set include:

• {{ }} bindings
• Some directives like ng-show/ng-hide
• Filters
• Scope variables
• ng-repeat
• $scope.$watch

These watchers are evaluated on every digest cycle.

When deciding upon bound data, it is imperative that the developers consider if it needs to be two-way binding or if initial loading would suffice. In some cases dynamic calculation may be required while in many other cases one-time binding can be considered and the values can be set post initial calculation.

Ng-repeat

Ng-repeat is an extremely powerful part of AngularJS. Nested ng-repeats increase the number of watchers, and understanding the same, an experienced AngularJS development company avoids the use of nested ng-repeats where possible.

In addition, HTML functions that determine the array to be used in the ng-repeat should also be avoided. They recalculate these functions even if there is no change, thereby unnecessarily reloading the ng-repeat each time. Instead, limit the array to a fixed number and then track the ng-repeat by the index. This eliminates the need for the developers to create nodes in the DOM each time; it will only change the value if required. A perfect way to display limited amount of content is by using pagination.

Limiting HTTP requests

Every response to a HTTP request results in kicking off a digest cycle. To limit the same, it is perfect to create endpoints to handle bulk requests when required and changing multiple indexes in one go, which ultimately requires only one digest cycle.

Debouncing the ng-model

If an input field is assigned to a ng-model and if a user types in an input field, every keystroke is considered a change to the model, which results in a digest cycle. In most cases, an AngularJS development company allows you to benefit from debouncing wherein the changes can only be applied when a user stops typing for a particular period of time. Debouncing helps enhance user experience as the user does not experience any lag at the time of typing.

Using ng-if or ng-switch instead of ng-show

Ng-show and ng-hide make use of CSS to hide the node, which means that the Node is always present there and thus incorporated in any calculations made in the digest cycle. On the contrary, ng-if and ng-switch remove the node from the DOM, ultimately cutting down unnecessary calculations.

Using $watchcollection instead of $watch

AngularJS can perform an object’s deep checking by using $watch. In this case it has to evaluate every property in an object, which can be expensive, especially for deeply nested objects. Thus, it is better to use $watchcollection, which limits deep collection to the first layer, leading to improvement in app performance.

To scale your AngularJS app, connect with a reliable and experienced AngularJS development company that can employ the right solutions for scaling your app while ensuring major improvements to your app performance.