The vast amount of traffic could result in possible downtime for the site, meaning\u00a0it would take much longer to sell that stock.<\/p>\n
While the folks at Raru expected twice the traffic as last year, upgrading hardware wasn’t an option – so how did they do it?<\/p>\n
It helps that the site is primarily automated, but with prices and stocks changing by the second, the technical team had to be prepared for the increased traffic well in advance.<\/p>\n
Raru’s Renier Crause<\/strong> revealed how they kept the site up during the madness.<\/p>\n First Raru\u00a0upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, which includes an upgrade to PHP 7.<\/p>\n The site’s\u00a0benchmarks showed that this gave it a 130% increase in performance under load. The Ubuntu upgrade also resulted in\u00a0the latest versions of Nginx and MySQL.<\/p>\n The database was stress-tested and many configuration settings were adjusted for the site’s specific hardware and expected load.<\/p>\n Because of the way Raru\u00a0runs its big deal event days, with new products appearing at regular intervals, this causes extreme spikes in traffic at those intervals as many people are refreshing their\u00a0browsers at the same time.<\/p>\n For example, on Raru’s 2nd birthday sale, the concurrent connections at the spike were approaching the limits that Nginx could handle on the site’s\u00a0hardware.<\/p>\n To mitigate this Raru\u00a0implemented the following:<\/p>\n At 06:00 it was already clear traffic was going to be big.<\/p>\n By 07:00 Raru was\u00a0already past a normal day’s peak traffic even though its\u00a0Black Friday deals only started at 08:00.<\/p>\n At 8:01am the site went down, only to reappear at 8:02am.\u00a0With so many people refreshing at the same time, the database was having to update the new prices and deals on the products which pushed the site beyond its one minute timeout. If it used a two minute timeout, there would have been no downtime.<\/p>\n The site’s big deals sold out in minutes. As a result, Raru went past an\u00a0average day’s turnover in just 14 minutes.<\/p>\n At 10:00 when the next batch of deals came online, some people experienced another timeout but it was only for a minute.<\/p>\n By 11:00\u00a0Raru had passed last year’s Black Friday total in sales. The site\u00a0broke its all-time record of new customer registrations in a day even though most people pre-registered earlier in the week.<\/p>\n At 15:00\u00a0it had passed its target for the day with still 5 hours to go.<\/p>\n At 20:00\u00a0people were still buying last-minute deals, so Raru\u00a0extended the deals to 22:00.<\/p>\n After Black Friday ended, the site automatically reverted to its normal home page and switched off the black colours.<\/p>\n With the huge volume of transactions countrywide, the company that handles 3D Secure for credit cards couldn’t cope and many people were unable to complete their credit card payments.<\/p>\n Fortunately, Raru\u00a0does offer other payment methods and the ability to switch your payment method or retry your card later, after you secured your stock.<\/p>\n By the afternoon, 3D Secure improved and most people could complete their payments, but this meant that they might not have made the cut-off for their purchase to be shipped on Friday.<\/p>\n Raru has revealed to MyGaming just how big Black Friday was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":234,"featured_media":91629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_enabled":true,"_sma_x_custom_text":"","_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1197,23461,12541,2163],"class_list":["post-112169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-black-friday","tag-black-monday","tag-raru","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112169"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112185,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112169\/revisions\/112185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Technical<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n
On the day<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The bad<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The numbers<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n
![\"black-friday-2016-technical\"](\"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Black-Friday-2016-technical.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nYou can catch Raru’s Cyber Monday deals here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/h4>\n
Now read:\u00a0The confirmed list of South African stores offering Cyber Monday deals<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"