Deep performance optimisations for a leading UK defence contractor.
The Brief
Adapt Digital approached us to help their end-client who had an app for their internal communications, but there were a number of performance issues at play. The app was meant to efficiently deliver Financial results, HR announcements, Company News, events and essentially all important information about the company to the tens of thousands of employees. The problem was that it would time-out and crash, often! Disaster! The backend infrastructure was based in WordPress with data being provided to the mobile app via a custom API, 1994 were brought in to fix the issues while longer-term solutions were explored.
£25-50k
Price range
The process
1994 went on a journey of deep analysis, and while delving deep into the code and queries that powered the API, they formed a systematic approach to build from.
Every page within the app was made up of several content blocks, and many blocks created 50-100 queries that needed identifying, analysing and re-working.
Combining 1994's deep knowledge of PHP and SQL, the team were able to identify multiple core pieces of code that were responsible for the bulk of the poor performance. The team took two simple approaches to improve performance:
Reduce the overall number of queries being performed
Optimise the queries that are performed to ensure they have as minimal impact on performance as possible
Every query was then tested several times to confirm its resolution, and to ensure that the the data returned was the same with our optimisations.
The result
Throughout the eight-week analysis and app improvement process; performance went from 60 seconds freezes and timing out issues to reducing queries to less than a second. Problem solved!
Words from the client
"The experience of working with 1994 was exemplary. Their attention to detail regarding the deliverables and their level of customer service were second to none. We always felt in the loop on progress. If any challenges presented themselves that even hinted at impacting timescales or our delivery path, 1994 were forthcoming & transparent in what they were and how they intended to deal with them. The process was simply a joy from start to finish."
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