pedwfrontend/context/performance-and-stability-baseline.md

Performance & Stability Baseline (Phase 1)

Last updated: 2026-05-13

Baseline observations

Performance

• Loader-heavy pages (myportal/representation/new appeal) perform multiple external calls per SSR request.
• Form XML is read/normalized repeatedly from disk in SSR path.
• Some large components still combine orchestration + rendering, increasing rerender work.

Stability

• Several SSR/data paths assume nested API response shapes without guard rails.
• Representation resume/new loader had crash/redirect fragility around missing contact/representation objects.
• Logging noise can mask actionable failure signals.

Changes started in this phase

1. Added in-memory XML cache in lib/forms/readFormXml.js (safe, process-local).
2. Added null/redirect guards in lib/representation/pageLoaders.js for missing user/contact and missing representation entry.
3. Began auth-path de-duplication and redirect hardening (see auth reliability doc).

Next baseline improvements

1. Add guarded defaults in remaining loader paths (loadNewAppealPage, myportal page loaders).
2. Introduce structured non-sensitive SSR failure telemetry for dependency failures.
3. Expand bounded concurrency/parallelism where safe and contract-preserving.