Seatwave was growing fast, success was unabated, and industry awards were landing on their doormat. Infrastructure had been revamped, load patterns were understood. Everything was going just great…
Until…
The marketing team planned Seatwave’s first UK TV campaign – all regions – simultaneously, but only told the engineering team the day before the first advert was due to run!
10 seconds into the advert the site melted and there was a collective thud as heads hit desks.
It was expensive lesson to learn but also the wake up call that forced everyone in Seatwave to focus on the performance of their site.
In this session we’ll share that pain we experienced, and how we improved performance so that when all our competitors crashed during the UKs largest concert ticket sale, we were able to take 20 days revenue in just 2 hours!
However, maintaining performance is a challenge, product owners want new features, the site starts to put on weight and slowly performance starts to degrade once more.
Will it take another disaster to focus everyone on performance or is there another way to avoid “boom and bust”?
We’ll talk about the steps we’re taking to avoid “boom and bust” by making both performance and the impact performance has on our customers visible to everyone across Seatwave including:
Our Adobe Site Catalyst installation with a custom implementation of the W3C Navigation Timing API allowing us to segment our business KPI’s by speed.
How we’re using a WebPageTest within continuous integration for our QA and production builds.
How we constantly review our performance against competitors using our own installation of the HTTPArchive.
Join us on our quest in search of the Holy Grail of truly understanding how web site performance affects our business, and the processes and systems we are putting in place to ensure we keep speed at the heart of our product development roadmap.
21. User
All Limit Checks
Traffic
counters
Queuing
iRule
Increment /
Decrement
Data Group
Site | Limit
Original client request is
passed from queue back
to F5 so customer goes to
the exact page they
originally requested when
queue is inactive
Site Limit Checks
Does
Cookie
Exist?
Yes
No
Does
All Sites Limit
Exist?
Yes
No
All Sites Limit
Exceeded?
Yes
No
Does
Site Limit
Exist?
No
Yes
Site Limit
Exceeded?
No
Infrastructure B
Infrastructure A
Main Site
When client
timer reaches
zero
Server
controlled timer
served to client
Yes
30. Traffic Profile 14th November 2010
60
Spikes within 15 seconds of TV advert start
40
30
Traffic boost in ad breaks when we had
no active advertisement
20
10
Time
23:00
22:00
21:00
20:00
0
19:00
Traffic multiple
50
