GigaSpaces’ Uses In-Memory Computing to Combat Website Latency
– Shay Hassidim, Deputy CTO, GigaSpaces, says:
As you know, a bad user experience on Cyber-Monday can cause users to abandon an eCommerce site faster than during non-seasonal online shopping, resulting massive revenue loss. The average revenue loss of just few hours shutdown during Cyber Monday can impact company yearly revenue in 10-15%.
With coupons scattered across the internet and increased overall demand on Cyber-Monday, Commerce websites have to automatically adapt and expand with such fluctuating customer’s behavior. Usually there is limited amount of products that have a special price during these sales period. The first ones that will manage to access the website will get the best deal.
Because most relational databases systems keep data in tables, there is a lock placed on inventory table raw that is in the process of updating. With typical average eCommerce website traffic, this isn’t an issue – but with too many requests at the same time, retail systems can face slow-downs or even a lack of ability to manage the requests due to this table lock behavior. On days like Cyber-Monday, sudden intensive loads create a situation where retailers’ traditional central database systems are burdened by a large number of simultaneous lock requests for the same inventory table raw (this is done in order to update the data with user activities). This burden causes a delay in the backend database response time. In some cases such a load can bring down the database system and shutdown the entire eCommerce system preventing users to perform any transactions for several hours!
Inventory management, offers , reservations, fulfillment, personalization, pricing and promotions components of the eCommerce systems need to be designed differently to ensure a website survive Cyber-Monday. The system of record must be elastic , blazing fast, cannot rely on a database or any disk based storage medium , must be highly-available across multiple data centers or cloud environments and provide enterprise level security.
The GigaSpaces XAP in-memory compute product has been the system of record for many leading eCommerce systems around the world, delivering low-latency response time even on massive peak load. The legacy enterprise database is not part of the transaction path, which ensures ability to cope with millions of transactions per minute leveraging commodity inexpensive hardware.
GigaSpaces XAP integrates with leading eCommerce platform such as Oracle ATG and IBM Portal/eCommerce platforms allowing users to leverage their investment with the existing eCommerce platform. XAP can be easily integrated with these systems as a reliable and fast system of record that can deliver peaceful mind to the IT and the retail executives during the peak load of Cyber Monday. This integration immediately delivers ROI and shorten the time to market when the eCommerce implementation enhanced to support new products , offers or promotions.
Businesses need to think about traffic timing differently on one of the busiest days of the year. This is just one solution to a behind-the-scenes problem that should be addressed.
For more information on GigaSpaces technology visit: http://www.gigaspaces.com/xap-
