Warranty Client Success Story
I had a project to take a look a severe performance problem with a warranty application. The application was so slow it was that it was effecting user productivity as they waited as much as 10 + seconds for PDF’s and data to be returned to the web browser. Below is a basic depiction of their application architecture. Take a minute to review and give your thoughts on the root cause of the performance problem.
If you said distance and latency you are correct, so good job. During my finding session with my client, I added up the round trip distance in miles from a fictitious warranty application user in Chicago to the web application server in the West Coast to the web services server in East Coast. The round trip distance is roughly 9600 miles. I then asked the client how long it would take to fly 9600 miles. Theiranswer was over 12 + hours. I did the math 9600 Miles/ 500 Miles Per Hour = 19.2 Hours. They now had the root cause of their performance problem. It takes 19.2 hours to fly round trip 9600 miles and they expect multiple PDF’s and data to be returned sub second. Even at the speed of light 186,282 miles per second over fiber optics it impossible for a sub second response, since it is also dependent on internet providers, internet bandwidth, routes, number of hops, the slowest network device it has to pass thru, internet traffic, data payload size, web service application, server disk speed, and server CPU, etc. Also note the last mile latency in your neighborhood, the dmarc in your building, your router and network switches where the warranty application user is located. DISTANCE DOES MATTER when calling 3 rd party web services. The closer the webservices are to your web applications servers the faster response time.
The quickest solution as depicted below was by moving the web services server into the same data center in the East Coast as the application web server. This now made the application performance acceptable, but we can make it even faster and highly available. Additional phases of the project is to include a global load balancer which can routes users to closest of 1 of 3 servers located East Coast, Midwest, or West Coast. Also moving PDF’s to AWS S3 buckets in multiple data centers regions.
Also note the client had financial reasons for hosting in their environment verse hosting with a cloud provider. This would be a perfect warranty application to be 100% hosted in the cloud.
Contact DRK Resources Tech to help architect your high performance warrantyapplication hosting that is also highly available.