Celarix
Improving Transactional Throughput By a Factor of 20A Quick Look:
Celarix, Inc.(www.celarix.com) builds high-performance supplier networks by leveraging the power of collaborative logistics. Recently, it needed to significantly improve the transaction throughput of its flagship product.
The Challenge:
Celarix faced an order-of-magnitude increase in business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Consequently, it needed to determine the upper limit of scalability for its current products. At the same time, it wished to demonstrate its product’s ability to process the anticipated transaction volume.
The Solution: To help it determine its capabilities, Celarix engaged Collaborative Consulting. At the outset of the project, experienced technical professionals from Collaborative teamed with their counterparts from Celarix to model system usage. Later, the team designed a series of performance tests to identify system bottlenecks. After testing and metrics gathering, Collaborative and Celarix professionals developed a comprehensive performance report. The account outlined:
- A set of "quick hit" coding and configuration changes to improve system performance.
- A capacity-planning spreadsheet to predict when additional hardware would be necessary to handle increased throughput.
- A set of long-term architectural recommendations for the system, several of which Collaborative helped implement. Initial phases of this effort produced a Web-based middleware framework based on Java, C++, ISAPI, XML, and MQ Series.
In addition, Collaborative has partnered with Celarix on various software development efforts, which include key framework components and end-user products. Among other infrastructure components, the team created a C++ framework for Oracle database development, which leveraged Oracle’s OCI API, a Web-based ISAPI security framework, as well as a set of configuration services for managing the operations of Celarix’s batch and online systems.
The Results: The team improved the transaction throughput of the client’s flagship product by a factor of 20. The extraordinary results came about because of Collaborative’s proven approach to architecture reviews, structured performance testing, iterative testing, and application tuning.
After the transaction throughput success, Collaborative continued to work at Celarix, implementing the recommended performance enhancements and enhancing its in-house approach to Performance Engineering. As a result, PE was introduced as a step on the project plan for most products, and a performance environment was established. Collaborative was also instrumental in a product redesign to create a common architecture across the client’s entire Web-based B2B product line. The new architecture helps Celarix achieve a linear-scalable design, and moves it closer to its goal of processing several million transactions per day.
Additionally, Collaborative began involvement in the architecture of several projects. Based on several business and operational factors, Celarix decided to re-architect its product suite, and Collaborative was, and continues to be, instrumental in this effort. The project is another example of a client keeping Collaborative representatives on site for numerous follow-on projects.