Black Friday – The most awaited shopping season of the year where the list is prepared in advance, the funds are already kept aside and the only thing that remains to be done is fishing for the best deals and filling the cart. Shoppers are all set to make the most of the year’s craziest shopping frenzy; is your website ready to offer them a seamless shopping experience?
The reason why most sites fail, slowdown or crash during the Superbowl of eCommerce is because their database fails to keep up, taking the whole site down along with the sales. According to the latest projections, this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales will hit unprecedented heights so make sure your website is up and running to accommodate the endless rush of online shoppers.
The following 5 tips should help you ensure infrastructure stability before Black Friday and beyond Cyber Monday:
1. Scaling
Make sure you do not miss out on a single shopper this Black Friday by building a scalable infrastructure that is always ready to handle the traffic explosion and transaction spikes without suffering an outage. Scaling enables you to meet consumer demands round the year even when they exceed your expectations when used in conjunction with Database load balancing software. A load balancer is designed to facilitate transparent scale out and instant scale up with no app changes. It sits transparently between your eCommerce app and your servers, efficiently routing traffic and managing connections to make sure Black Friday shopping does not become a frustrating experience for your customers.
2. Connection Multiplexing
When it comes to database performance, inefficient connections become one of the biggest bottlenecks during seasonal peaks. To ensure high availability, your database should be configured and set to an optimal value for the fast and efficient handling of all your incoming requests even as the traffic peaks. Your app should be configured for connection pooling and your database server for hardware failures. If you want to ensure zero downtime throughout the year, you can rely on database load balancing software. A load balancer performs connection pooling and multiplexing to reduce the number of connections to the backend, facilitating faster database access and delivering the required connections for active queries while the remaining ones are multiplexed.
3. Monitoring
Even if you have invested in powerful hardware, the performance of your database server can be adversely affected by a single bad query. Track down the slow sections and queries that are consuming maximum resources and fix these problems before they become detrimental. Use analytics to stay on top of performance issues, anomalous behavior, memory constraints, imbalanced workloads, and denial of service attacks that are slowing your apps down. Database load balancing software gives you end-to-end visibility into your database with precise data so you can take better decisions, proactively troubleshoot performance issues and make improvements in time.
4. Load Testing
Analyze the previous year’s shopping trends and sales figures while including factors like the number of transactions/second, throughput, memory usage, disk response time, requests/second, and CPU utilization. Based on the insights, forecast the existing capacity of your system and make adjustments wherever necessary. Load test your servers to replicate sale transactions and your database server to check if it is fully equipped to handle the estimated number of arriving requests during seasonal peaks. Conduct a health check of your system and test all high availability solutions to make sure your existing infrastructure performs at peak efficiency even when it is stressed beyond expected limits.
5. Optimizing Database
Take advantage of database load balancing software to optimize your existing apps without taking them offline or rewriting code. A load balancer adds resiliency and real-time analytics enable fast and easy implementation of new services that support tiered offerings. Stay prepared for unexpected traffic spikes and scale beyond the Black Friday shopping surge with dynamic load balancing that delivers continuously updated information, optimum functionality, and unmatched usability. Offer your customers a smooth shopping experience even with 10X traffic by replacing your last-minute fire fighting tactics with new-age technology. The best way to avoid unexpected outages and service disruptions during traffic explosion is to deploy database load balancing software that enables zero downtime and extreme scalability so you can fearlessly tackle the traffic tides of Black Friday head on.
About the author: A self-proclaimed tech geek, with a passion for ScaleArc’s disruptive technology innovation in database load balancing. Tony has a passion for dissecting tech topics such as transparent failover, centralized control, ACID compliance, database scalability and downtime effects. On his days off, he can be found watching sci-fi movies, rock climbing or volunteering.