Performance Tuning Increased Customer Happiness
Project Details:
- Client: Island Water Technologies
- Industry: Water Treatment
- Solutions: Docker, SENTRY™
As a company, Island Water Technologies (IWT) develops cutting edge wastewater monitoring and treatment solutions. The Sentry solution by IWT is a unique bio-electrode sensor technology that allows for real-time monitoring of microbial metabolic activity in anaerobic and aerobic wastewater treatment systems.
The Challenge
With increasing adoption rate of SENTRY in the market, IWT required the expertise of a software development team to support Sentry. The processes for managing the codebase were not standardized and error-prone. It was hard to perform development on the application as it required a lot of system dependencies. Furthermore, the performance of the application was suffering. Sentry sensors collect data every minute, and with hundreds of sensors in the field, the application logs over 2 million data points into the database every week. When collecting such a large quantity of data without optimizing the SQL queries, the application grows to be very slow. Some pages took 30s or more to load, and others would not load at all.
Our Solution
Torq IT quickly took over management of the codebase and streamlined development to improve application performance and practices in a few ways:
Architecture: The application was rearchitected to reduce the number of database calls and allow the database to work more than the application.
Release Process: Steps in the software delivery process were automated. This prevents manual errors, provide standardized workflows for developers, and enables fast releases to production.
Development: A standardized development environment build on Docker was added to ensure that developers were all operating in a consistent environment.
IWT transitioned support of the custom backend and data dashboard to Torq IT in 2019. It was a very nervous time as our clients rely on the service to interact with the SENTRY product. With only limited documentation Torq IT was able to maintain the service immediately. Torq IT has been able to improve the quality of the service as quantified by faster service response time and achieving zero server downtime for the past 3 months. Complaints from clients regarding service response have been evaporated.
Colin Ragush
Technology Lead, Island Water Technologies
The Results
Island Water Technologies is now able to operate in a standardized development environment and efficiently display weeks worth of data with the largest reports rendering in less than five seconds.
They are now also confident in the stability of the system for their customers.
