Performance
The Elastic Path Commerce Engine platform is enterprise-grade—delivering over $6 billion in annual revenue to our clients, and capable of handling 20 million individual products and thousands of concurrent users in a single installation. To help maximize their conversion rates and customer satisfaction, Elastic Path clients enjoy response times that are up to 100% faster than their closest competitors, and up to 30% quicker than the industry average as measured by Compuware® Gomez.
The Elastic Path Commerce Engine achieves this phenomenal throughput with maximum efficiency, saving your enterprise money in hardware, compute time, and software costs. With horizontal scalability approaching 98% you can rest assured that for every dollar you put into scaling your ecommerce, almost every penny goes right back into driving revenue.
How fast is the Elastic Path Commerce Engine?
Elastic Path has been deployed by more than two hundred customers worldwide, including many companies that dominate their industries. As a result, we've seen some phenomenal throughput possibilities:
Metric
Pageviews per hour
Unique user sessions per hour
Orders per hour
Concurrent user sessions
Application response time
Throughput
Up to 240,000
Up to 90,000
Up to 12,000
Up to 3,400
As low as 200ms
Performance Capabilities
Extreme Scalability
Testing indicates 90% horizontal scalability when delivering customer experiences through a traditional storefront and up to 98% when using Elastic Path Cortex. Clustering horizontally is also ideal for reliability and failover reasons. The Elastic Path Commerce Engine may also be scaled vertically using multiple virtual machines in one instance, which provides excellent performance, but without the failover benefits.
Search Server Clustering
The Elastic Path Commerce Engine provides horizontal search server clustering. This provides massive scalability and failover benefits. To ensure the consistency of search performance, you can also assign an independent server solely for updating indexes.
Database Clustering
The Elastic Path Commerce Engine is certified on Oracle® and Oracle® RAC for large-scale enterprise deployments. The latter permits database clustering and the addition of nodes at any time, to enable effective horizontal database scalability. Microsoft® SQL Server clustering and MySQL™ clustering are also possible.
Caching
Customer experience: The Elastic Path Commerce Engine fully supports proxy cache servers, which can accelerate throughput over 50% by serving static content and media. Elastic Path also has extensive experience with edge caching using content delivery networks such as Akamai®.
Persistence layer: The Elastic Path Commerce Engine uses OpenJPA data caching to reduce database activity. A custom extension can also offload this cache onto a distributed infrastructure such as Oracle® Coherence or Terracotta™. Significant performance improvements have also been made by using application server-side prepared statement caching.
Application level: Application level caching is supported out of the box via an Ehcache-backed cache. The Elastic Path Commerce Engine can also plug into robust enterprise caching frameworks including Oracle® Coherence or Terracotta™. Further object or application layer caching is also possible with additional customization.
The Elastic Path Performance Lab
Elastic Path has an in-house performance laboratory that uses a variety of techniques to ensure maximum product reliability and performance with each release of the Elastic Path Commerce Engine. Our continuous automated tests include:
Standard benchmark testing
A two-and-a-half hour test that indicates general system performance and scalability. We benchmark key metrics such as Apdex, as well as throughput based on response times and pageviews per second.
Endurance testing
An extended test that exercises the Elastic Path Commerce Engine at approximately 80% load for periods that range from 8 hours to several days. We do this to ensure that our software is stable and reliable over the long haul.
Focus testing
A series of tests that measure the performance of key components under large loads, such as checkouts, or concurrent customer sessions. These benchmarks help us determine the performance and reliability of major modules within the Elastic Path Commerce Engine.
Production deployment testing
We maintain a separate in-house environment that is continually placed under real-world scenarios such as server or network failure. These tests help us to ensure that the Elastic Path Commerce Engine is reliable enough for the world’s most demanding enterprises.
