7. Application Performance and Building SaaS on PaaS

Chris Castle introduces Ryan Townsend, CTO of Shift Commerce, and the two begin by discussing the absolutely abysmal performance of web sites in areas with bad latency: airplanes, the rural countryside, or even just within a crowded cafe or conference. Shift Commerce provides a customizable shopping platform for its customers, who are several big brand retailers. For them, every millisecond of delay means lost revenue, as studies have shown that customers are unlikely to complete their purchase if it takes too long.

It's important for Shift Commerce to stay hyper-tuned into its performance. Since it's a multi-tenant application, they have several safeguards in place to ensure that one customer's traffic spike doesn't affect any other retailers. One such strategy is to lean into several of Heroku's features, such as its API, to do some of the heavier lifting. They're perfectly contently to let Heroku manage the operations work while they focus on the application itself.

When it comes to increased traffic, although there are "quick wins" by increasing the number of dynos available, fundamentally what Ryan has found important is to think about the architecture of the site holistically. That means everything from trimming down the amount of JavaScript delivered to efficiently managing the number of database connections made.

Links from this episode

• Ryan's talk at #PerfMatters Conference 2019
• Web Performance Optimization stats, listing articles about how popular websites have sped themselves up
• How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales
• Facebook's '2G' Tuesdays, an initiative that artificially slows down the Internet connection at Facebook to spur empathy towards creating faster response times