The Streema Blog

Starting late last year, at Streema we’ve been working hard to improve the website’s uptime and performance – nothing is more annoying than a tech service or device when it doesn’t respond, right?

So we wanted to give you guys a quick update on this, but before we start, though, two important definitions:

Response Time: The interval between a request that enters and the answer that is received. In this case it’s the page load time, i.e. the time to retrieve the HTML page (without images, stylesheets, JavaScript, etc.). So, although it could be below a hundred ms (milliseconds), as a user, it could translate into seconds to load a complete page.

Downtime: It is the period when the system is unavailable, i.e. the period you wait, mostly doing nothing, and if it goes above what you expected, you start hitting your computer or anything around you, in addition to shouting out phrases such as “come on!”, “ahhhh” or others that we can’t publish right here. :)

So, we’re happy to share with you that we’ve reduced our Response Time almost by a half and the number of Downtimes by about 75%. Even better, some of the Downtimes we had before took hours, now they are less than 10 minutes – additionally, now they only happen because of our own updates to our site and not because of infrastructure problems!

For those techies out there, here’s a quick summary of what we’ve been doing to get results:

• Increase the number of servers and balance the load with Nginx.
• Improve the database setup to take advantage of the servers memory.
• Rewrite many SQL queries, specially the ones that requested temporal tables on the hard drive.
• Change the configuration of the Apache modwsgi and increase the number of processes to serve requests.

Finally, regarding the tools we’ve been using, the main ones were: Apache’s Server Status, Munin, New Relic, Percona Tools and Pingdom.

We’re planning to continue developing our performance infrastructure – and we hope you continue visiting Streema. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team