Electronic Arts (EA)

Speedhunters is EA's online magazine about car culture, a WordPress site on AWS with stories going back to 2008. EASY, an EA studio, brought me in remotely because the site kept going down.

The outages came from how the site had grown. A page cache had hidden the problem for years: as soon as cached pages expired, the database load rose until the whole site stopped responding. Behind it, the number of photo attachments had grown enormously, a single post ran hundreds of queries, custom code wrote to the database on every page view, and the servers were still configured for a much smaller site.

I started with an investigation and a report based on measurements, not assumptions. Load tests showed where the gains were: reducing the attachment records alone made a post page three to four times faster. In the second phase I implemented the improvements in the server-side code, the frontend, the database infrastructure and the load balancers. The outages stopped.

As a Senior Software Engineer, my responsibilities included:

• Investigating the outages and writing a performance report with findings and recommendations
• Measuring performance with load tests and front-end audits
• Reducing database load by cleaning up data and cutting queries in custom code
• Reconfiguring the database infrastructure, web servers and load balancers for performance