- Development, Design, Bespoke Module Builds, Payment Integration & Security
Contract: Active (Since 2018)
Niche: Fashion Company UK based
01. Rebellious Fashion team were using a tool called Visual Merchandiser, which is a great tool and a timesaver, allowing you to manage categories and products visually; you only need to drag and drop product images in order to change a product position within the frontend. For any fashion company it’s a must have tool, which integrates into Magento Enterprise; however, they were utilising Magento Community version and what with the team using Visual Merchandiser at all hours, which included peak periods (when the site was getting thousands of hits); this became a real server performance killer.
02. As previously said, Visual Merchandiser is an amazing product, but without the right architecture – it can destroy your revenue through strangling the stores database. For this to work – we had to develop an asynchronous indexer algorithm to extend the Magento’s core indexer.
03. You will find caching services are definitely underestimated by most hosting companies, and we often see these incorrect setups being poorly managed, this isn’t the hosting companies fault,
as they don’t have the deep understanding of Magento Architecture as a specialist firm like ourselves would have. By setting up Varnish Cache properly – Magento will run like a tornado; every ecommerce companies dream.
In this situation UKfast host engineers couldn’t workout how to use this great software to stop the caching bottleneck and felt fit to just switch the software off - that was a big mistake.
As we did a deep dive with a powerful monitoring tool (New Relic), we were able to see the segments that were causing the database to shutdown, producing 501 response server errors. This meant the storefront was returning errors in the middle of peak periods – halting sales.
We placed our Lead Developer Neven (bit of a genius) on the task; he switched Varnish back on – for us to fix the issue - this needed to be done as part of the deep dive. This opened the door to various other historic issues appearing.
I am amazed at how many times I have seen hosting companies do quick sloppy workarounds, yeah they’re quick – but when they affect the ecommerce company’s revenue – that just annoys me.
04. The backend had been utilising several APIs and with the usage of Visual Merchandiser tool, this was causing massive bottlenecks in the busy periods.
The Colour swatch (a custom made module purchased at Amasty) was lagging at the category pages during busy hours; this was in addition to the load issue also attacking the category pages.
The core indexer was interfering with all orders and stock management; the indexer needed to be run frequently by the staff, allow for managerial transparency on orders (successful or not), who had a heavy reliance on it for stock management.
The present indexer was showing ‘index required’ and didn’t change the status at all during the day; Rebellious Fashion management were working blind.
01. One additional dedicated server for Varnish cache and Haproxy
02. One additional dedicated server for database replication
03. One additional dedicated server for Magento Backend - allowing backend tasks to be completely separated from the storefront server.
- We redefined TTLs for each ESI block in turpentine configuration file in order to utilize higher cache rates in Varnish. For example: Block for Cart content was passing requests along to backend for the default setup. After our modification, the cart content was cached per user. This update has significantly reduced Varnish MISS rate and it has extended Varnish HIT rate to over 65%.
- We removed all media files from being cached in Varnish. This move allocated more space to Varnish. HIT rate extended for another 18%.
- We fixed the two most common issues that arise with default settings being used on Varnish and Magento: Cart content being lost in the middle of the checkout process and cart content is getting cached. This is a real pain for many storeowners who would like to utilize Varnish caching. Varnish is a synonyms for fast ecommerce websites.
New Relic - Complex monitoring tool
UKfast - Dedicated hosting
CentOS Enterprise edition - LEMP stack
Varnish - HTTP accelerator and reverse proxy server
Bitbucket - Code repository
Git - Distributed version control system
Gatling - Stress test tool
Google Analytics - Traffic analyser
Magento 1 - eCommerce platform
Asynchronous indexer module for faster and transparent indexing
extends magento core module (available on GitHub for download)
Banner slider module
optimized for google insights
Apple pay custom module integrated through Worldpay
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