PAJACYK.PL HANDLES 15,000 CLICKS PER MINUTE

CASE STUDY: PAJACYK (PAH)

Pajacyk is a program run by the Polish Humanitarian Action (PAH) to provide children from vulnerable environments with nutrition support. For some children, help from Pajacyk is their only hot meal during the day. Besides donations, the program obtains funds via the users’ clicks on the belly of the toy clown (“pajacyk” in Polish) found on www.pajacyk.pl. The website quickly gained popularity, which caused problems with handling the increased traffic.

CHALLENGES

The simple yet effective idea of supporting children in need brought the website over 20,000 visits a day from the very beginning. During special promotional campaigns and intensified activity in social media the website traffic increased by up to 25%. The existing infrastructure became insufficient. Pajacyk was based on one server with 8 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM and an 80 GB SSD. Such configuration made it difficult to handle higher loads. The organization approached Oktawave, and we were happy to design and provide a new solution free of charge.

SOLUTIONS

When planning the migration, Oktawave team focused on the nature of the traffic to the website, which runs numerous special campaigns causing sudden increases in interest and number of visitors. Consequently, we used the load balancer and autoscaler services available on our platform. This combination allowed us to adjust the number of virtual machines instances (OCI) depending on the load.

After the first tests we tweaked the application and reconfigured the server. Debian Jessie was chosen as the operating system. The pages were to be served via the latest version of nginx with a PageSpeed Module — a useful addition for the optimization of served images and static text files.

With appropriate configuration, the module also enabled us to automatically distribute the load across subdomains. Moreover, it helped the administrators set appropriate headers, thus extending the local (browser) caching of static files. One should also mention the use of Memcache, which enables serving the most frequently used files directly from RAM.

However, the Oktawave team did not stop there. Since the CMS is built on the WordPress platform, we deployed the then latest PHP (7.0.2) with FPM. Consequently, the PHP script processing speed increased over 9 times in comparison with the 5.6 branch.

The administrators chose a database with a MySQL engine in the latest available version (5.7) as it offered better performance than the previous versions. They used Apache Jmeter to test and tweak the infrastructure.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Cloud migration decreased the traffic generated by the server and made Pajacyk’s website load faster on the visitors’ devices. The new infrastructure is easily able to handle traffic of 670 Mbps. Tests have shown that it means more than 15,000 clicks per minute. This provides positive user experience and allows PAH to fulfill its mission — helping the greatest possible number of children in need — more effectively.  Following the deployment of the solutions suggested by Oktawave, PAH can fully focus on its priorities. Therefore, the program has been broadened: since March 2021, it has offered psychosocial support for children and young people.

The organization noticed the positive migration effects as soon as a week later:

• The server sent 1.3 TB of data to the users.
• Over 300,000 clicks of the toy clown were recorded.
• A maximum outbound traffic of almost 400 Mbps was recorded.
• Constant CPU load of 20% was maintained.
• Memcache via PageSpeed handled over 93% of requests.

With website migration to Oktawave we have gained stable, secure and scalable infrastructure. Now we are prepared for any traffic jump. The new solutions have also resulted in TCO savings.

Magdalena Jaranowska, Coordinator of the Pajacyk program