Our Optimisation StoryOur Optimisation Story

September 2011

Perry Dyball

Ecommerce Operations Manager

2009

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2009

No focus on performance

2008 had seen infrastructure instability

• Business was growing rapidly

• Start-up infrastructure could not cope with demand

• Issues with quality of data centre supplier

Moved data centre provision in Jan 2009

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Focus was on UPTIME

The kick we needed....

• Q4 2009

• Michael Bublé was the hottest act in town

• First ever TV advertising campaign

• National coverage

• 3 adverts scheduled during X -Factor / Michael Bublé

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• 3 adverts scheduled during X -Factor / Michael Bublé special

• 15 seconds into play of first advert........

2010

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2010

Why did we want to optimise?

It boils down to this ...

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to save money and to make money

Why did we need to optimise?

• Frequent releases with poor measurement and testing

• Speed to market versus slower engineering process

• Problem compounds & worsens over time

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• Problem compounds & worsens over time

• No single culprit – all tiers of the platform

• Had the problem harmed our business?

• In the early start up phase – almost certainly not.

• Once we were established and growing fast – yes.

Project Approach

Business buy-in

Make a singlechange

Baseline performance

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change

Measure itAdapt your plan

Analyse results

Tools we used

• WebPageTest.org

• Y-Slow / Firebug / Fiddler

• Site Confidence Monitoring Portal

• Site Confidence Performance Analyser

• IDERA (DB Monitoring)

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• IDERA (DB Monitoring)

• SQL Profiling (Server Side)

• SQL Reporting Services

• Better use of our F5 LTM’s

Phase 1 : Front End Optimisation

• Areas yielding highest benefit• Compression (check your configuration)

• Compression moved from IIS to F5 Load Balancer

• Object caching at F5 Load Balancer

• Reduction in HTTP Requests / Spriting / File Consolidation

• Image size consistency

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• Image size consistency

• Removal of third party killers (Images/JS)

• Parallelism (CDN)

Client Side / Page Optimisation Results

Page load performance both improved and

became more consistent

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Phase 2 : Back End Optimisation

• Database• Analyse web page db interaction

• Repeated tracing of all db calls

• Reports on worst performing aspects of the db

• Computing DB CPU per user session

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• F5 Load Balancing

• Upgrade internal network layer configuration to 1Gbps

• Upgrade F5 O/S to V10.2

• F5 traffic management rules / log

• CDN

• Non image assets – JS / CSS serve from CDN

DB CPU per user session

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The technical result

• Reduced HTTP Requests by 30%

• Reduced Page Load time by between 50% and 70%

• Reduced Page Size by between 22% and 33%

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• Reduced Hard Bandwidth requirements by 43%

• Reduced DB CPU usage by 75%

• Increased Concurrent Users ceiling by 300%

The business result - kerching!!

• We were up, when our competitors were down

• Able to handle x60 traffic peaks

• 30 days of revenue in 1 day

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On-sale traffic TV Ad traffic

2011

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2011

Don’t rest on your laurels....

• The year of social network integration

• New homepage design

• Advert re-targeting

• Development team .NET MVC adoption (yet more javasc ript)

• These cost us 50% of our previous gains

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How did we bring it back...

• Caching and self serving Facebook data

• No Facebook API calls on page load

• Suspension of a third party click tracking analysis

• Now 97% of pages load under our 3 second target (IE 8)

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2012

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2012

Our future challenges

• Maintaining our position

• Deal with the 3% over target - one is the home page

• Organic growth

• Latency from new non UK data centres

• Globalisation of the business / time zones

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• Globalisation of the business / time zones

• As yet unknown product demands

• Performance challenges in the mobile space

The final message

Performance

is just not for today...

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is just not for today...

...it is for every day

More detail on the 2010 project at :

http://www.slideshare.net/sthair/seatwave-web-pefor mance-optimisation-case-study