Refactoring Code to Improve Performance and Decrease Costs

Pain Point
We were approached by a popular services company with a Kentico 12 MVC build that was performing poorly. They maxed out the available vertical resources in Azure and requested help with scaling horizontally. Business editors were very frustrated with the editing experience rigidity and slowness of the CMS. The company provided a loyalty program to its customers who were consistently unhappy with the speed and less than 80% uptime of the application. A review of the azure resources indicated that Memory and CPU utilization were frequently peaking at 100% causing the web app to restart.

Solution
Instead of pursuing a horizontal scale and a potential never-ending requirement of increased resources, we focused on the cause of the high resource utilization. A review of the codebase revealed poor coding practices, larger than necessary database queries, and a lack of caching strategy. In addition, multiple security vulnerabilities were discovered surrounding authentication, sessions, form submissions and object references due to a lack of understanding of the CMS API and proper MVC development. The CMS itself was built in a way that made it difficult to add and modify content, or create new layouts. 
We focused on refactoring the code to properly request and cache data, and handle errors. We also created dynamic sections and widgets with more available configurations so the content team doesn't have to rely on the offshore development team as much. We also took the opportunity to educate the client on the additional marketing capabilities of Kentico and assisted them in setting up activity tracking, microsites and campaigns.

​Result

• The refactored code decreased CPU and memory utilization by over 60%.
• The client was able to save money in Azure by scaling down to a lower tier.
• Loyalty signups & retention increased, and customers are satisfied with the applications speed and availability.
• The cleaner codebase provided a better foundation for the offshore team to continue the good coding practices.
• Editors are happier with the CMS because they can efficiently make and schedule content updates and campaigns.