Code Performance is Important

The puzzles that a fair few geeky companies post on their jobs pages to try and vet/encourage great coders to complete them and apply for jobs are quite cool (I definitely don't fit in the great coder bucket). Recently I noticed a fair few of them are focussed on code performance and so thought I would share my experience of code performance harming my site.

The graph above is the exit rate for users visiting my display cocktail pages on my cocktail site (according to Google analytics which has pretty graphics but some data issues) against time. The initial decrease in exit rate is awesome and primarily due to implementing the cocktail recommendation engine. Suddenly in mid July there is a massive jump in exits, this coincided with a process I was running for my facebook app really screwing up and slowing down every query run on my database :(. I shut that query down (although didn't realize what was happening for a month) and (for the moment) have given up on my facebook app to concentrate on the main site. After shutting down the process performance and exit rates improved instantly.

I don't monitor the performance of the scripts on my site anywhere near enough. Last weekend I built tracking to monitor the ranking of cocktails on my site weekly, pull out fast moving cocktails and so on. I have started logging keyword searches on my site too as of last week. This weekend a key focus for me is producing a performance dashboard summarized by hour of day and day of year. I am going to start monitoring the efficiency of all changes I make and see where I need to make improvements.

Cocktailmaking.co.uk has grown 3x since last year. The site also gets 25% of it's visits in December with 10% of those on New Years' Eve. I need to make the site much much more efficient before that date comes or my servers will be a smoking mess this year and I'll capture none of the revenue that I should.

Code efficiency is really really important.