Shop Akira — JetRails

With stores spanning across the Chicagoland area, shopAKIRA.com has garnered international recognition for its eclectic in-store experience and trend-setting styles, but it doesn’t stop there. The company has expanded its reach with a thriving ecommerce website and tailored merchandise covering everything from high-end women’s fashion to shoes and urban streetwear. The brand has become more than just a fashion hotspot, it has put Chicago on the map as a fashion center and is representative of a cultural lifestyle in the city.

Migrating to JetRails has been one of the best decisions we've made. Support is there around the clock, extremely fast, and responsive. Our programmer is especially appreciative of our now stable and predictable environment, and he finally has some peace of mind knowing there is another team out there monitoring our site at all times.

Sara Kim, Ecommerce Buyer & Marketing Director

Challenge

The Website was prone to crashing with higher than standard load times. Additional infrastructure was added in an effort to compensate for the site’s declining performance which impacted the operations budget.

As part of a JetRails deployment, shopAKIRA.com is continuously monitored up to the first line of code by engineers at our Chicago-based NOC. During routine monitoring, the site load times started to demonstrate volatility. Our engineers recognized the occurrence and immediately engaged the shopAKIRA.com development team.

An extraordinary load was detected on the SQL database server which was further attributed to a specific line of code within a 3rd party Magento module. This module was running large-scale queries on a repetitive cycle causing load in the SQL database to spike from a baseline of 1% to between 60-70% of CPU utilization. This was overpowering the site and causing instability.

JetRails Action Plan

Once the 3rd party module responsible for the query was detected, it was removed from production which instantly eliminated the excessive load from the Website. Our NOC engineers worked with the shopAKIRA.com development team to collaborate. Historical data was collected and uncovered that additional resources, above what was needed, had been devoted to the SQL server to compensate for the drain which had long been considered a hosting issue.

With proper attribution to the module, this issue could be permanently resolved with no further repercussions. Protocols were put in place to ensure there was no recurrence of similar events.

Results

After the JetRails intervention, shopAKIRA.com operated smoothly and with speeds that rivaled top competitors within their industry vertical. The integrity of our 100% uptime guarantee remained intact. With resources properly allocated, operational expenses and the need for emergency crisis intervention was eliminated.

Furthermore, a major crisis was mitigated by the collaborative efforts between our NOC engineers and the shopAKIRA.com development team. This crippling load had the capacity to crash the website and would have required major intervention and a deployment to a development server to remedy.