When faced with a web application which is struggling to cope with peak loads, the initial response of managers and C-level officers is that a server upgrade is needed.

At Clarinet, we seek to maximise the efficient use of resources for our clients.
It might be a simple tweak to the database structure, creation of the right index for the query, or implementation of a content delivery network.

Whatever the right solution might be, not checking for programming inefficiencies will detract from end user experience, reduce the velocity of your growth path and could cost you dearly in missed opportunities for sales.

After completing his PhD in computer assisted molecular design of neurotransmitters back in 1993 Daniel O’Callaghan turned his analytical mind towards solving Internet related problems others said were too hard.

Case 1: 1999 – a stockmarket listed company in Australia asked the web hosting department of a large telco for a solution to create a zero downtime website. Telco said “impossible”; We said “Short time-to-live DNS entries with server monitoring and automated DNS entry changes.” It took a couple of hours to implement. Not bad for something which was “impossible”.

Case 2: 2016 – online pizza ordering service could not cope with server loads on Friday and Saturday evenings, causing a drop in revenue despite higher web server usage. Hosting company tried tripling the memory of the cloud server. We looked at what was happening on Friday, proposed a fix, which was applied on Saturday morning, and on Saturday night they had their biggest revenue night ever.

We get a kick out of improving the efficiency of web applications. Our tools include:

• MariaDB – with appropriate tuning
• SQL – get the schema, the queries and the indices right
• Migrating from PHP 5.x to PHP 7.x
• Implementing REDIS memory based object cache
• Nginx and OpenLiteSpeed web servers