Brian Doll, manager of software development at Sheet Music Plus shares his tips on preparing your site optimal application performance, capacity and scalability during the peak season. http://bit.ly/vM336

1. Optimizingyour Online Storefor the Holidays Brian Doll, SheetMusicPlus.com Mike Malloy, New Relic

2. Agenda Why application performance is important? What’s at stake? About SheetMusicPlus.com Tips for optimizing your online store Special “Get Ready for the Holidays” Promotion

3. Why Application Performance is Important to Your Business 30% of online shoppers abandon slow or unreliable sites In 2008 holiday season, 36% of users encountered web performance problems that led to abandonment Specific problems encountered Application slow while shopping Application froze/crashed Unable to make a purchase at first attempt Website down/unavailable Apparent successful transaction failed to complete

4. What’s at Stake? $50 Billion a year is lost in cart abandonment 48% will go to purchase from another online source 79% are less likely to visit the site again 44% of affected customers tell others about their poor experience 46% form a negative impression of the company

5. SheetMusicPlus.com Largest source for sheet music, instructional materials, and song books in the world.

6. SMP: Quick Stats 12 year old online business Shipping to 170+ countries Over 600k SKUs, 1.5M songs All hosts are virtualized with VMWare Citrix Netscaler 14 Rails application servers (Apache + Passenger) 5 memcached servers 3 Solr servers (search, faceted navigation) 3 MySQL servers

7. Scalability Buzzwords Asynchronous processing AJAX Query Cache Share nothing Memcached PassengerMaxPoolSize SSL acceleration HTTP compression Web Services Content Delivery Network HTTP Caching ETags Amazon S3 Data sharding Amazon EC2 Cache hit ratios Load balancing Database read slaves

8. Analyze your architecture What systems are involved in… displaying a product detail page your checkout process searching your catalog registering as a new user How does your application respond to failure of any of your system connections? search servers offline payment gateway unresponsive email server overloaded DNS lookup failures

9. Analyze your business How do new and returning customers use your application? What is your ratio of new and returning customers? How might holiday traffic impact that ratio? How might an increase in sales negatively impact the customer experience? How fresh is your inventory online? How might order status information be affected? What is the average response time for your call center?

10. Metrics for everything New Relic RPM Application performance, systems metrics, custom metrics with dashboards New Relic RPM for Java (Solr search servers) Memory profiling, garbage collection, throughput, performance MySQL Enterprise Monitor MySQL performance, slow queries, explain, replication delay, configuration Cacti (based on RRDtool) Host servers, VMs, Memcached stats, network, anything you can think of Google Analytics Customer behavior, on-site search, conversion, other business metrics

11. Now you can optimize Identify a specific pain point Ensure you have verifiable metrics Deploy an initial optimization effort Measure the effects. Are you on the right path? Deploy the “final” optimization Document your optimization timeline Profit! Demonstrate the business value of your optimizations Repeat

12. Simple Optimizations Implement the circuit breaker pattern Don’t let system failures bring you down! (from Release It! By Michael Nygard) http://github.com/wsargent/circuit_breaker Cache page fragments for set periods of time For dynamic content that can be “stale” for some definable period of time http://github.com/rlivsey/timed_fragment_cache/ Content Delivery Network Essential for international customers; requires coordination with deploys Memcached Set up memcached and you’ll find more ways to use it every day New Relic RPM I would not run a Rails app in production without it

13. Embrace Change No code freeze! Take advantage of this increase in customer demand Implement new business strategies to adapt to changing demographics Focus on your ability to release change quickly Strive to release to production as frequently as your business can handle Ensure your releases are automated and repeatable Understand how your system behaves during a release Releases should be low ceremony, as a testament to how rigorous your software testing andbusiness approval processes are Add capacity on-demand How fast can you get a new app instance online and handling requests? Engine Yard Flex is an excellent model for how we should be thinking about our infrastructure, software dependencies and release processes

14. Get Ready for the Holidays Promotion New customers: any account opened before October 15 will get 25% off Current customers: Any upgrade – additional hosts or higher level of RPM service before October 15 gets 25% off Enter Promo Code: NR-HOHOHO