A checkout that stopped falling over on campaign days
Peak traffic took checkout down three times in one quarter. We measured where it actually bent, fixed four things, and left the load model behind.
- Checkout p95, before
- 4.2s
- Checkout p95, after
- 780ms
- Peak orders held
- 2x
- Incidents since
- None
Example An illustrative case, not a delivered engagement. The figures below are invented and are here so the layout can be reviewed — replace this record with real work before publishing.
The situation
Every campaign day ended the same way: checkout slowed, the queue backed up, and someone restarted workers by hand. The team had been told the database needed sharding. Nobody had profiled production, and the load tests ran against an average request rate that the real traffic shape never resembled.
What we did
We took a baseline in the first week from production traffic rather than from a synthetic average. The bottleneck was not the database: it was a per-request call to a pricing service with no timeout, behind a connection pool sized for a quarter of the concurrency. We fixed the pool, added a budgeted timeout with a cached fallback, moved two write paths onto a queue, and put a load model in CI that replays the real campaign-day shape.
Where it landed
The next campaign day passed without an incident and without anyone watching it. Checkout p95 came down from 4.2s to 780ms under twice the previous peak, and the sharding project was cancelled before it was funded.
More work.
A monitoring platform that keeps European data in Europe
Six monitoring tools most teams buy separately — uptime, API checks, recorded browser flows, visual regression, sitemap scanning and heartbeats — behind one dashboard, one alert engine and one on-call chain. Built and operated by us, hosted entirely in the EU.
- Tools in one suite
- Six
- Pages per full-site scan
- 500
- Fastest check interval
- 60s
Eleven years of grant software, made changeable again
A working system nobody dared touch. We moved it seam by seam, in production the whole time, with no cutover weekend.
- Change lead time, before
- 6 weeks
- Change lead time, after
- 4 days
- Cutover weekends
- None
Tell us what is not working.
An hour on a call, no charge and no deck. We will tell you honestly whether this is work we are good at — and if it is not, who to talk to instead.
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- One working day
- First call
- One hour, free
- Notice period
- One month, either way
- Based in
- Odense & Copenhagen