Haute Performance: Cracking the Flash Sale

HauteLook has experienced 4x year-over-year growth in total throughput for the last two years running. This poses a unique scaling challenge for our engineering team as we work to serve millions of unique members per month and handle over $2MM in revenue per hour during flash sale events. Join us as we share the learnings, techniques and war stories that helped us achieve a 10x reduction in load times while scaling and growing our stack and organization. Overview: - Principles of performance - Identify and resolve the biggest bottlenecks first - Choose and use your tools (or make your own) - Understand your tradeoffs - Limit total work done - Choose technologies that inherently scale - Always Be Tuning The Performance Commandments - Know thy System - Know thy Datastore - Know thy Runtime - Know thy Application Infrastructure tuning (Know thy System) - Choose bare metal whenever possible - Tune your kernel - Stay up to date - Choose exotic hardware carefully - Avoid disk writes Rock-solid MySQL (Know thy Datastore) - Defend your database from rogue applications - Scale out whenever possible - Focus on fault tolerance, not disaster recovery - Hire an expert - PHP scaling (Know thy Runtime) - Use recent versions of PHP - Use Doctrine wisely - Frameworks are inherently slow - PHP eats CPU. Lots of it - Keep an eye on your IOPS Product-oriented performance design (Know thy Application) - Focus on the parts that make you money - Monitor on business events, not technical faults - Take cues from user behavior