San Diego Java User's Group

Speaker: Tim Morrow, Senior Architect at Shopzilla

Title: Performance By Design - A look at Shopzilla's path to high performance

Abstract: In the summer of 2007, Shopzilla decided to finally do something about the fact that our websites (Shopzilla.com and Bizrate.com) had become so slow for our users. Our original consumer sites were built on a monolithic design and had over 6-7 years become difficult to change and more difficult still to scale engineering teams to support. We had a platform with more than 6 years of accrued technical debt, but were presented with a classic dilemma for an established internet market player: Can we really afford the costs – real and opportunity – and the risks of re-engineering a site platform responsible for all of our revenue? Perhaps even more importantly: What will we really get from a site overhaul? Will the site really be faster? Can we really innovate more easily given a “better” software design? Will we even complete the project, or will we be forced to abandon it mid-stream? Will we make more money?

YES!

Just in time for the 2008 holiday shopping crush, Shopzilla successfully completed a 16 month re-engineering initiative and released Shopzilla.com and Bizrate.com on a new site platform we call “site 2”. At the time of release, the sites’ functionally were the same as “before”, but the consumer experience changed dramatically. The following are some highlights of the many benefits realized by our re-engineering:

* Dramatically faster page load times for our users: The site 2 average full-page download time is now 1.5 seconds (1 second above the fold) for Shopzilla.com – down from 6-9 seconds! (2 seconds for Bizrate due to banners).

* Huge improvements in availability: The “platform” is much more than the software. As we re-engineered the site platform, a significant area of design focus was on sustainability, support and management of the entire delivery ecosystem – from the software, to the people, to the systems. The result has been a significant increase in both uptime and availability. In Q4, 2008, our site availability was 99.97%, up from 99.51% in Q3 – and an average of 99.65%. In terms of innovation, we have been able to maintain this availability rate into 2009 while increasing our platform release velocity by more than 200%. After all, it doesn’t matter much if your site is fast if people can’t get to it…

This talk will explore Shopzilla’s site 2 initiative in detail. We will discuss:

* Performance as a design consideration. We began the site 2 project with defined performance targets and considered performance at every major design decision. We'll present a detailed and technical review of the technology choices made by the Shopzilla team, the trade-offs and the architecture itself. We will also take a frank look at wrong turns, poor choices and lessons learned in the design and implementation process.

* Front-end techniques applied for improved performance. We implemented many of the Yahoo UI best practices. We'll examine which ones we applied and types of improvements we've seen.

* Our use of Oracle Coherence as a distributed caching system for improved performance and availability

* You get what you measure – Why any team should obsess over this concept – from technical SLA’s to financial performance metrics.

* The platform is bigger than the software – it includes the infrastructure, the people and the leadership

* Keep your eye on the ball. We learned that the constant drive to add features and change our software can easily unravel a high performance site. We'll discuss what tools and technologies we use, and plan to use, to continuously monitor our performance.

Bio: Tim Morrow is a Senior Architect at Shopzilla focusing primarily on the bizrate.com and shopzilla.com consumer-facing websites.

Company Bio: Shopzilla, Inc. is one of the largest and most comprehensive online shopping networks on the web. Through our leading comparison shopping sites, BizRate.com® and Shopzilla.com®, Shopzilla helps shoppers find the best value for virtually anything they want to buy from thousands of online retailers. Based in Los Angeles, Shopzilla operates sites in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. The company is owned by Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. (NYSE:SNI), which include national lifestyle TV networks such as HGTV, The Food Network, Fine Living and more.