Build for Performance - the dominant trait in our genes

The real test for a consumer application online starts when thousands of users hit the service simultaneously and the site is able to serve all users within acceptable performance norms. Realization of innovative product ideas excites the development team, leading to, them focusing on ways and means to woo the user. The attention turns to extreme usability and high visual quality. One of the major things that can keep the user ‘attentive’ is quick sub-second response from the system - else the next service is just a click away.

Generally speaking, handling of such performance issues is kept on hold, till the end of product development process, and the ‘time to deploy live’ pressure pushes this consideration to bottom of the stack.

We, at EC consider this aspect upfront, leading to a design that is ready to be deployed in a distributed setup. Though the deployment scenario varies from service to service, the generic pattern is presented here.

To povide extreme delight on performance front, we use caching of data wherever possible. In many of our projects, we use ‘memcached’ for alleviating database load and ’squid’ for caching frequently used content for faster delivery of content leading to considerably improved performance.

‘Build for performance’ is the dominant trait in EC development genes, and that helps drive our methodologies to create services that transform ‘customer satisfaction’ to ‘customer delight’.