The holiday season is around the corner and with the code freezes, teams fear to risk any major changes to production to hamper the critical business time of the year.
Below are quick 5 pointer non-code checks that can help prepare and enhance the website holiday traffic and sales.
1) Examine the Infrastructure Sizing
If on-premise servers are running critical applications, recalculate the approximate capacity or how much traffic these applications can hold up.
This is based on different data points and includes the number of requests per second, average application server response times, instances and their details of CPU, cores, threads, sockets, etc. All the required information typically can be gathered from the analytics or monitoring tools.
Calculating the number of Cores?
For doing this all that is needed is to load the CPU information (lscpu) and view the information related to Threads per socket, Cores per socket and several Sockets.
Calculate the maximum load or throughput of the system?
The next step is to calculate the number of average requests to the application servers. This can again be calculated by viewing the data of the monitoring tool. The information needs to be fetched for the most peak traffic or expected peak traffic for an application or website.
Calculate the Average response times?
The next value that needs to be calculated is the average response times from the application server. This information also is available using any monitoring tool or can also be calculated by using the expected average value in seconds.
Now with the required information in place, the number of cores can be calculated using the formulae
Number of cores = Requests per second * average response time in seconds
2) Tweak the Enterprise Search Relevancy
Several Research articles show that Browse and Search pages are the most visited pages as well as the pages where most customers are lost. Several websites spend a lot of money and time on external Search engine optimization and one of the key features that are overlooked is the Relevancy Ranking of products on the website browse and search.
Below are some tips that can help boost the relevant products to the top and bury the least preferred products on the site.
Prioritization of Attributes
Attributes precedence is key for relevancy. There needs to be a clear definition of the data associated with these attributes. Special considerations have to be taken for data like Category Name, Product Name, Descriptions and other keywords, as these attributes form the basis of the Search Engine Index. Custom attributes can be created as required and added to the prioritization list.
Monitoring Search Results
Use analytics to monitor user behavior on the search and browse results. Information like most clicked products and categories, most popular searches for a product and category, error results, zero product search, the search result with auto spell correction, page behavior, etc indicates clearly how relevant results are shown to the user. These data form the basis of boosting the required results and ignoring irrelevant results.
Enterprise Search Engines
The setting of core search functionalities like Synonyms, Thesaurus, Stemming, Spell Corrections, Did you mean? play a vital role in displaying the relevant results. For sites having multiple locales update custom stemming files with the top key search words. Also, it’s very essential to keep building the dictionary as and when new data sets are added.
3) Keep a Close Vigil on the Browser Load times
Page load times matter a lot during the peak traffic time. While application health is one aspect of evaluation, the end customer load times also need to be closely monitored.
Below are a few of the areas that need to be evaluated so that the browser load times are not hampered.
Evaluate the Caching TTL
Retrieving static content over the public network is not cheap. Larger the file size larger is the bandwidth and higher cost and lower response times. Caching of static content in the browser plays a critical role in reducing those server calls resulting in faster performance and quick page loads.
Ensure HTTP cache is enabled which enables servers to direct the browser cache to serve the content for a longer duration.
If CDN is used, reevaluate the TTL for those static contents especially the images.
Avoid those Content Publishes
Every content push to the live site requires clearing of caches. Try avoiding the risks of these content pushes during the peak times and if required ensure that only the specific content cache is cleared.
Avoid those External Scripts Calls
All the third-party integrations that the website refers to especially from the browsers have to be looked at. During peak traffic hours every external script is extremely vulnerable and can bring down the browser load times and in some unfortunate cases, the website as well.
4) Tune Database Performance
Evaluate the Relational database performance to prevent those long-running queries. Below are a few of the basic tips that can help optimize the database in a quick time.
Evaluate the Database Statistics
One of the critical aspects of tuning the database is collecting and understanding the statistics. While the monitoring tools give certain information on the most time-consuming queries, the statistics collected from the database server can give detailed information about specific tables, the index distribution, details related to database sizing, etc.
Optimize Indexes
It is vital to have the right insight of indexes on tables. This is the most common issue found when dealing with RDBMS. It’s very essential to understand the fine gap between no indexes and too many indexes, Indexing strategies for inserting, reading and updating data.
Most of the modern databases give information regarding columns that are required to be indexed, their priority order, missing or incorrect indexes, etc and also provide required suggestions on improving them.
5) Network Optimization
Retrieving website over enterprise network is underestimated. Responses within the internal organization network require many round trips between the enterprise internet gateway, firewalls, load balancers, security gateways and those web and application servers placed in different data centers. Below are some suggestions that can help optimize the internal network.
Try to remove those additional firewall rules which can gain few milliseconds for every request.
Try to keep the internal network free from any excessive internal traffic.
Identify those infrastructures with a single point of failure and monitor them closely.
Look out for those Bots and Hostile IP addresses that are clogging the network bandwidth.