Analog Devices
Optimizing Web Site Performance
Company Overview
Analog Devices is a world-leading semiconductor company specializing in high-performance analog, mixed-signal and digital-signal processing (DSP) integrated circuits (ICs).
Business Challenge
Recently, Analog Devices’ product description and specification Web site, www.analog.com, experienced frequent and inexplicable outages. Too often, customers were presented with a “site unavailable” page, rather than the content they requested. This problem had a direct impact on sales, because the site is a main entry point for customers wishing to purchase products. Presumably, some would-be customers would try other vendors’ sites to obtain what they needed, instead of trying a different avenue to reach Analog Devices. In addition, Analog.com content authors were not able to publish new content to the site reliably, limiting its effectiveness.
Collaborative Role
Analog Devices asked Collaborative to diagnose the issues that led to its Web site instability, and to provide remedies. By following its comprehensive performance engineering methodology, Collaborative was able to identify the transactions that caused the problems. From there, Collaborative reviewed the application architecture and code, and recommended modifications for both. After eight weeks, these recommendations were delivered with a three-phase release schedule, providing short-term relief to the organization.
Collaborative produced a list of changes packaged into a series of three releases, with ease of implementation and expected impact serving as key guidelines. Changes that created a significant impact, but could take place relatively easily were part of Release One. More difficult changes occurred in later releases. In other words, Collaborative showed Analog Devices what to fix, and suggested the best order in which to approach the repairs.
Stored procedure tuning was chief among the modifications. Collaborative identified particularly inefficient stored procedures and helped Analog Devices optimize them. In one case, the average execution of a stored procedure went from more than three minutes to less than five seconds. Collaborative also suggested configuration changes to Analog Device’s application-caching strategy, thereby significantly minimizing DB calls. This strategy followed the first tenet of performance engineering: If something takes a while to execute, look to eliminate its execution entirely. If that approach is not feasible, look to tune it.
Benefits
After Collaborative rolled out the Phase I changes, outages stopped. Today, Analog Devices is able to publish new content consistently. As a result, customer satisfaction and loyalty have increased, and fewer customers turn to other providers. In addition, Analog Devices can focus its IT energies and people on more strategic initiatives, the kind that generate profitable growth, instead of fixing bugs and other avoidable operations.
And, because authors can now publish new content consistently, Analog Devices is able to optimize its Web site’s marketing and sales capabilities, keeping content extremely fresh and useful.