Improve site performance and manage traffic with no crash

Getting thousands of requests on a server daily is a serious issue for the underlying infrastructure and one of the reasons to improve site performance and manage heavy traffic. The high load of your server may not only slow the site response but also lead to the server’s failure. No business owner wants to find himself in such a situation. To avoid slowed load times and accessibility issues, it’s vital to introduce load balancing solutions and figure out the ways of speeding up the site response. In this article, we’re going to describe the ways of site performance optimization and share our experience of server response improvements.

First and foremost, before explaining the solutions to this issue, let’s take a closer look at the two important tips that help get ready to handle a high traffic load. They are easy and vital for everyone who doesn’t want his users to experience crashes and slow loading to follow:

• What is the speed of your mobile site version response?

According to Google data, 96% of people use their smartphones to search on the Internet and are more likely to make a purchase via their mobile phones. That’s why it’s important to empower the website with thoroughly thought architecture and fast loading time.

• Upgrade your server infrastructure

Originally, many websites with low traffic share one server and that’s the alternative way for them to save money. But, if you observe the increase of traffic on your website – you may encounter the crash (together with all the websites that share this server with you). The solution is to get a dedicated server and, maybe, to host your own site. It will rid you of the third-party dependencies and will give you more control over the website. 

In addition, if you want to see how your site would act in the case of heavy traffic, you should regularly maintain tload testing. There are many tools to test the performance of the resource in the case of a website high load. Inspecting the ways of dealing with the high traffic beforehand might be the case. 

How do websites manage heavy network-traffic? 

As a rule, there are three main options that may be used by websites: 

• The opportunity to invest in a huge machine with big amounts of power processing, memory, and redundancy.
• The distribution of the load across a few servers.
• The combination of the first two options (if we’re talking about a very large website). 

As for our company, we’re therefore inclined towards option number two. This kind of load distribution is called load balancing. However, there are the load balancing methods among which one chooses the most suitable for him or her. Let’s sort all these methods with their algorithms out: 

• Least Connection 

The method is mostly used when the constant connections in the traffic are unevenly distributed among the servers. The main idea of this method is to direct traffic to the server that has the lowest number of active connections. 

• Least Response Time

This type is similar to the first one since it directs traffic to the server that has not only the lowest number of active connections but also the lowest response time.

• IP Hash 

The load balancing solution lies in the determination of the target server by IP address.

• Round Robin 

The approach is based on the server’s rotation – it directs the traffic to the available server and after that moves it to the back of the queue. This is the method we’re going to look closer at from our development team perspective and explain all the details of bringing the Round Robin method into reality. 

How to streamline the load of the servers with the help of a load balancer setup?

As we described above, the load balancing solutions contribute to the site performance optimization, management of heavy traffic load, correct distribution of the traffic load and, consequently, improve website scalability.

Caution: Don’t get it wrong and wait until your business starts suffering from traffic overload and site crashes. Time to act has come if you already observe the rapid increase of website visitors – and that’s what exactly happened to our client when they asked our team to develop a load balancing solution. 

Shortly speaking, our client is engaged in the Travel & Hospitality industry and the website crash would bring them some significant losses. So, they wanted to avoid this possibility by any means and asked our company to develop solutions that would eliminate the errors and crashes the users may encounter. 

By using AWS cloud services, our DevOps team developed an elastic load balancing solution using a Round-Robin set-up within one month. This load balancer reduces the load on all the servers by redirecting users’ requests to the less loaded server. Thereby, we ensured the availability of server scaling without impacting the performance, improved the control of the server, and excluded the errors. Also we carried out the load test to verify that infrastructure is working as expected.

 

The website response and load may be improved not only by the introduction of load balancing tools but also by the speed-up solutions. 

How to reduce the website loading time

Did you know that 53 % of users will leave your website if the loading time would take longer than 3 seconds? As it is defined by Google, the server response time shouldn’t be higher than 200ms. To meet the visitors’ expectations and improve server response time, it is worth addressing the professional software development team. They will be able to find ways to speed up server response – optimize your site, check host, optimize pages, etc.

In fact, our experience has shown that the business owners concerned with the speed issue. One of our customers owned a fast-growing business in the Travel industry and it was crucial for them to reduce the server response time and ensure the high performance of the website. They had to make sure that the website users were not going to abandon the website during the actual booking. 

Generally, our cooperation took 3 months and involved the usage of Java technologies by ASD software engineering team. Our work consisted of three steps:

1. The server’s analysis
2. Choice of the tools to be used
3. Calculation of the fastest response time
4. Testing of the functionality 

As a result, we delivered great results that definitely met the requirements set by Google (200ms) and our client’s expectations.

If your goal is to learn to manage the heavy network-traffic and introduce as quickest as possible the server’s response to your visitors, then it’s important to figure out the reasons for any slowdowns or crashes. Only after the thorough analysis that has to be delivered by a professional tech team, it’s time to ask the software development partner to integrate solutions that would adjust your servers and optimize the page web speed.

In case you want to get more information on our experience with load balancer setup or server’s response time speed up, feel free to fill out the contact us form at the bottom of our page or get in touch with us on any of our social media pages. ASD Ltd. team is here to make the work of our customers more efficient.

References

1. thinkwithgoogle.com
2. softwaretestinghelp.com
3. officialbryangrey.com