Sebastian Kruk

The saying "if it doesn't exist on the Internet, it doesn't exist"[1] is ringing truer every day. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine most businesses without an e-commerce platform, let alone without a web presence at all. Since e-commerce is becoming the new standard, e-commerce performance needs to be at its best. In this blog series, I have come up with several ways to ensure your company's e-commerce performance success, including: avoiding unnecessary network load,reducing number of (internal) HTTP errors, improving backend performance,understanding your clients, ensuring scalability of e-commerce site and finally understanding sales results through conversion rate. Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, decided to expand its market reach with an e-commerce site where its potential c... (more)

Part 2 | Five Steps to Improve E-Commerce Performance for Increased Sales

In my recent article, "Five Steps to Improve E-Commerce Performance for Increased Sales: Introduction" I discussed problems encountered by our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats. The company quickly realized that e-commerce performance is critical to the success of an e-commerce platform and that sales will not increase just because you have an application online. We argued that while improving search engine ranking is important, you should never forget about the performance and usability in an e-com... (more)

Balancing the Load

A question that every online application provider will face eventually is: Does my application scale? Can I add an extra 100 users and still ensure the same user experience? If the application architecture is properly designed the easiest way is to put an additional server behind the load balancer to handle more traffic. In this article we recount an incident that happened to one of our clients when the cause of poor application performance was eventually attributed to problems with the load balancing of the application servers. HTTP Server (500) Errors Go Over the Roof Around 8... (more)

Let's Not Play Blame Games

When the operations team gets an alert about potential performance problems that users might be experiencing, it is usually either the infrastructure or the actual application that is causing those problems. Things get interesting when neither the ISP nor the application provider is willing to admit fault. Can we tell who is to blame? Could it be that it is neither the ISP nor the application provider? The IT department of our customer, SerciaFood, a food production company from Sercia (names changed for commercial reasons), received complaints about the performance of one of it... (more)

Can You See the Storm Coming?

As much as we try to avoid performance problems, they do happen. It is inevitable. But it is possible to learn to react fast, and in some occasions fast enough that the impact on the end users is negligible. Despite operators' best efforts, 73% of performance issues are reported by users, according to "APM: Getting IT on the C-Level's agenda" report by Aberdeen Group. This number is quite large considering that less than 5% of all users typically bother to complain at all. User Experience has a significant impact on business success. According to the Aberdeen report, poor perform... (more)