SharkTank Proofing Betswaps.com
Like any good startup www.betswaps.com hacked together a prototype of their vision to test out their assumptions. A few developers later they launched the product and validated the demand for their service. To get working capital to accelerate growth Michael went on Shark Tank Australia, the only catch with being on Shark Tank is that it comes with a spike of traffic, all of which hits in the space of about a minute. We were told to prepare for a spike of up to 10,000 users in the first minute of being live.
That’s when I got involved.
With a huge tech debt and limited time our only focus was, what will move the needle so we can survive the spike?
A quick inspection of the code revealed there was
- no caching
- no CDN
- no tests
- missing database indexes
- highly coupled code
- a 7 second server response time
To get visibility into why everything was so slow we turned on the frameworks profiler and setup New Relic. Digging deeper revealed
- the data structures required lots of queries
- the MVC pattern of the framework wasn’t being followed correctly
- unused code and libraries had not been removed
