When Ke Carlton of www.zeroloop.com set about redeveloping the website of one of his primary clients, he chose Lasso 9 to provide new solutions with higher performance and speed.
Cancom Limited is a Premium Apple Retailer based in Surrey, UK. Zeroloop has managed their site for the last few years, and is the technological force behind their new e-commerce site at www.cancomuk.com.
The Cancom UK site houses 13,000 products and receives over 150,000 requests each day. One of the primary goals was to provide a highly responsive site to handle the volume of both products and requests more effectively for the end user.
The drive to upgrade the site from Lasso 8.5 to Lasso 9 was performance and speed, and the client was impressed with the results on both scores. The features that required this added boost include:
Infinite scrolling in real time for product search results with no lag in the user experience
Speed in sorting the product display
Instant responsiveness on click, for such actions as changing the colour filter on a product display or adding items to the shopping cart
The client didn’t fully understand the difference the performance could make until they saw it for themselves in Zeroloop’s demonstrations, and then it “clicked” into place and won them over. The client described the user experience to be “more like a local application than a website”.
The site also displays well on multiple devices, including the iPad.
From the user engagement perspective, the site’s initial performance is impressive. The bounce rate is down by 30%, number of page visits is up by 40% and time spent on the site is up by 20 to 25%.
For Ke, the back-end performance is equally impressive. On a single high availability (HA) node without the cache primed the site handles 60 to 70 requests per second from 1,800 URLs, with the Lasso processes taking approximately 15 to 20 milliseconds of each request, including session handling. Once the cache is primed throughput averages 500 requests per second. Whereas Lasso 8.5 had previously been a limiting factor, that role now lies with the MySQL database, and Ke is exploring a move to MariaDB to further improve performance.
Other performance modifications made included assessment of when memcached was most useful. Under 500 requests per second, the use of 'thread object' was preferred. Above 500 requests per second, the use of memcached gave better performance.
Ke developed the new website with 3 nodes of Lasso 9.0.43, MySQL 5.2 and Apache 2.2 with high-availability load balanced hardware.
The development time frame was approximately 3 to 4 months of solid development time, with an elapsed time frame of about 6 months. Much of this time was spent perfecting the site. For example, Ke wrote custom database handlers to directly access the MySQL connector. The fine-tuning for the site's specific needs resulted in even lower latency for each MySQL request.
Ke, who is a Certified Lasso Developer, speaks of the flexibility of being able to write his own components from scratch and having them perform at the same level as everything else on the website.
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