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Performance

How your eCommerce site performs, particularly at peak times, it certainly one of the most important factors an internet retailer needs to consider. If your site is overly slow, or worse yet, unresponsive or down, you will certainly be at risk of losing business and customer satisfaction. There is no silver bullet to solve everyone’s performance issues, but we have laid out some scenarios below that should help you address you situation.

The most important thing to remember is that the ECF has been designed with flexibility and performance in mind. The ECF offers a number of different tools and strategies that can be leveraged to ensure you never have a performance or stability issues.

Performance Means Different Things to Different People

Part of why it is difficult to offer a “silver bullet” solution to performance issues is because every ECF customer has very different needs and requirements. One customer may be a brand name retailer, but have a very small catalog, but the items in that catalog could have many, many variations. Another customer may have millions of products, but while not having a large customer base may receive orders that are large in value and quantity of items. And there are endless variations in between these examples.

We get variations of the following question all the time, “I have 400,000 products, so how many and what kind of servers do I need to run my site?” There is no simple answer to that question, and below we hope to shed some light on why that is.

Strategies to Achieve Better Website Performance

As alluded to above, there are a number of ways to approach performance and ensure that you are leveraging the best practices of the ECF to ensure your site performs well. Here are some scenarios and strategies to consider

Extremely Large Catalogs (300k+ Items)

For catalogs of this size, usually the question that comes up is “How will the fact that I have to serve all these items to my site affect performance?” The important thing to think about is how those items will be found or delivered to a user browsing the site. To optimize performance in this scenario it is best to undertake some or all of the following strategies:

• Implement an enterprise level search provider (like Solr) which will be able to efficiently index you large catalog.
• Eliminate or reduce the number of actual calls you make to the product catalog or database when returning product information during the browsing, search, or checkout processes.
• Search is the critical element with large catalogs, because how you return that search data to you users will determine the response time.
• Consider running the ECF’s Catalog System on its own server. All of the ECF subsystems are able to be separated out and run independently of one another.

High Order Volume or Site Traffic

Another factor that can affect site performance is the amount of traffic you expect to receive and number of orders you plan to fulfill. Large, name-brand online retailers and merchants who experience high peak traffic around the holidays or other times of the year are most familiar with this. In order to safeguard against poor site performance during these high traffic periods, it can be beneficial to do the following:

• Run performance tests prior to reaching these peak times. The ECF contains test scripts which can be modified to meet you particular scenarios and needs. You should spend as much time testing your application as you do implementing it.
• Implement your ECF-based site in a load balanced environment that can handle the traffic you expect.
• Consider a cloud-based hosting environment, like Amazon. ECF has been tested in the cloud and this will allow you to easily and rapidly scale your infrastructure, without having to invest in physical servers.
• Implement fail over or backup servers that can handle additional load.

Small to Medium Catalogs (Under 10k Items)

Smaller catalogs can still have their issues when it comes to performance. The main question to consider here is the amount out information or data associated with the products you are selling. A small catalog whose items have large amounts of data, information, or associated content can often times cause more performance issues than larger catalogs with little product data. The data we are referring to could be multiple product images, videos, attributes, variations, and other information that is associated with your products.

In order to ensure that you do not experience performance troubles in this scenario, you should consider some of the same tactics as those with large catalogs:

• Test, test, and test some more.
• How you enable search will be critical because how you return and serve all of that product data to your users will determine how fast or slow your site responds.

The three scenarios above certainly do no cover ever situation our customers will face, and many of our customers will experience configurations and environments that are a mix of these three and will also encounter other factors not listed here. The point we hope to get across is that there is no one solution to address all performance issues. In order to achieve optimal site performance it takes planning, testing, and a careful analysis of the unique factors that will affect your site’s performance.