Increase Site Performance With Caching

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How Caching Raises Performance to the Next Level

A simple but powerful way to increase and improve performance for your Azure eCommerce application is to leverage caching capabilities. Two of the most robust caching tools for search and overall querying of the database are elasticsearch and Redis. Elasticsearch is an indexing platform that allows for near real time searching of strikingly complex sets of data, which are commonly referred to as documents.

Elasticsearch is typically utilized with products and their related associations, such as categories, attributes and various characteristics. It's possible to achieve a noticeably significant improvement to performance within the catalog system itself, simply by indexing it within elasticsearch.

Azure supports elasticsearch and the Clarity eCommerce platform is able to highly optimize the search catalog around this functionality. The Clarity eCommerce platform has a built-in index to take advantage of multiple elasticsearch capabilities. That translates as faster searching not only for all the products and their specifications, but for advanced filtering, autocomplete and fuzzy searching through the search panel as well.

Dynamic, Robust, & Scalable Solution

Elasticsearch in Action: Striking Improvement in Performance

Whenever you have even just a few dozen products, improvements to the caching for search can make a significant impact on how fast the searching and the catalog responsiveness is for the end user. In particular, whenever you have possibly thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of products, it's absolutely a necessity that proper caching and related optimization are in place.

In order to do this on Azure, we recommend working with an expert company who possesses the required experience and resources to perfectly implement elasticsearch. Extensive expertise is fundamental for successful optimization and fine tuning of the elasticsearch configuration on your eCommerce platform.

Since scenarios are usually more effective in highlighting the benefits of a tool, consider the following example: without elasticsearch, a product catalog system with a few hundred thousand products might take 30 seconds to a minute to return a complex search query that has multiple filters selected. With elasticsearch, that same query can come back to the end user within fractions of a second. The dramatic impact of elasticsearch is how it can improve the site's performance for cataloging extensive amounts of data by literally 1.000X or greater.

Clarity is an expert with optimizing elasticsearch within the Azure eCommerce platform. The Clarity team certainly welcomes the opportunity to discuss and review the most suitable caching tools for your specific project

Utilizing Available Tools

Benefits of the Redis Caching Tool

In addition to elasticsearch, the Redis caching engine is another practical tool to improve performance. Redis is a mechanism for caching that allows the calls to the database to get stored in a cache. From there, the results from standard queries can automatically be saved into a flat file system. This becomes a huge asset, as flat file systems and flat databases generally have the following capabilities:

  • Accessing data very rapidly
  • Effectiveness with highly complex sets of information
  • Data is stored in a way that can be accessed and filtered efficiently
  • Without hammering the CPU and RAM in the hard drives to get the data

As a result, Redis can help minimize the site load time for certain key website components that are cached, therefore reduced by a 10X, 200X or more. This increase in loading speed is in comparison to other areas of the site, outside of the product catalog for example. The Redis tool is also applicable to more common components, like the menu, some of the detailed views on the product pages and even things like customer-specific pricing.

You might have hundreds of thousands of products, each with their own sets of customer-specific pricing. Well, that customer pricing can be cached so that once it initially loads, it's stored and then Redis serves it each time that particular end user is navigating through the site.

In this case, you might notice a relatively slow loading initially. But after it loads once, the data is stored and won’t require a call to the database until the Redis cache is cleared. Clearing the cache can be configured and optimized per section of the site, so there’s no need to apply the action everywhere.

How Can Clarity Help

Clarity Azure eCommerce Experts

In short, the ability to leverage elasticsearch and Redis constitutes a huge advantage for Azure eCommerce. Caching tools make it possible to significantly reduce the overhead of the compute time and the overall resources that are necessary to allocate to the Azure eCommerce application. The ultimate goal that Clarity team brings to bear for any project is:

  • Improving performance
  • Locking down security
  • Constantly evolving
  • Growing the marketing and sales capabilities
  • Continuously optimizing the application
  • Offering insights and best practices

Clarity experts collaborate with the client team to help them take advantage of the knowledge and learning that Clarity is implementing in hundreds of other projects.

We certainly welcome the opportunity to discuss your upcoming project. Feel free to contact us and we will offer a complimentary review with our team of knowledgeable and friendly experts. You're also invited to explore the information below and discover more about related topics.