How we managed to stay on the top of the business that skyrocketed after an ad campaign

Agile development

We wouldn’t be able to achieve anything we have until now without approaching projects with the agile method of software development, which is the key to successful project development. When Dedoles informed us about the expected increase in their website’s traffic, we could react flexibly thanks to cooperation within our team, open communication and last but not least by including our client into the whole process.

Servers

We are using servers from VSHosting. CMS BUXUS enables us to turn multiple servers at the same time. We use 10 of them for Dedoles websites - 10 load balancers, 5 web workers and 3 databases. All servers have a minimum 3 cores and 128GB RAM.

Performance testing

Testing was carried out in two phases.

The first phase was simple. We started with a couple of simple tasks to see whether the server can do them both at the same time. To do this, we used Apache Bench and JMeter. This type of testing can reveal weak spots in the network infrastructure. It cannot, however, reveal the weak spots in business logic as most of the tasks are done by varnish.

That is why we had to move to the second phase which was complex performance testing by simulating online sales through JMeter. This testing executes a complete scenario of a customer’s shopping process - starts with categories and goes through product details, adding to the basket, the whole selling process to order confirmation. These scenarios are then executed concurrently to find out how many complete scenarios can the system execute and complete in the chosen time and whether they are all completed correctly.

Performance testing using scenarios made it possible for us to find the weak spots in the system under realistic load.

Speed optimisation

Our main priority are customers. They need to be provided with the same user experience whether they are shopping alone or with hundreds of other people at the same time. That is why we optimised the backends performance with varnish cache. Even websites, which normally do not rely on varnish caching (shopping basket) load some of their parts( such as Header or Footer) from varnish. Another important backend speed optimisation is through asynchronous task queues: tasks related to orders processing, cache invalidation, feed caching and such.

We need to dedicate the equal amount of attention also to frontend. We use CDN for all static content (pictures and videos) and we also automatically convert pictures to webp format. Javascripts are loaded through AMD modules, what enables us to bundle necessary JS files into layers and thus speed up the JS loading. Using varnish, we also cache some dynamit parts of the website in clients’ local storages.

CMS BUXUS

Last, but not least, we would not be able to achieve anything above without a strong and stable CMS BUXUS which can deal with all our complex tasks.