Putting people and the planet before profit, with nearly 100 stores across the UK, Ireland and the US. From humble beginnings as a kitchen table start-up in 1992, JoJo Maman Bébé offers gorgeous, quirky yet practical designs and excellent customer service.
When spikes in traffic occurred, a queuing system was being utilised to take the load off the server. This meant customers were held until a set point of CPU load was reached, and when that load reduced they were allowed to make the transaction. The queuing system allowed the site to operate even under extremely high numbers of users. But it meant longer waiting times and higher drop offs.
We conducted multiple tried and tested techniques to simulate traffic so we could benchmark and show what effect any optimisations we made were having. This enabled The Pixel team to discount various issues like hardware not functioning properly and look at page loading speeds. Finally, we used BlazeMeter (a load testing platform & benchmark system) to allow us to make customer journeys through the site with realistic test data and pinpoint the optimisations needed.
The new testing allowed us to identify that there were errors in the MySQL deadlock and query cache locking that were occurring in the core database. By editing the core database files, we debugged and identified the database locking errors as and when they occurred. Once errors were caught, the database was set-up to run a loop and retry processing the order up to five times. This fixed nearly all cases of database locking errors, making a huge difference in performance – 40 times faster.
Revenue increased
Conversion rate increased
Increased Page views/users