CASE STUDY : SUPPLYAPP.COM

supplyapp.com Magento 2 case study by aMiSTACX

Large Catalog Performance for Magento 2

When Inter Equipment, parent company for SupplyApp.com, and one of the largest industrial suppliers on the global market first contacted aMiSTACX back in November 2018, they were in the process of building out a very large Magento 2 catalog.

Not to over embellish, but we are saying very large. In fact, as tall and over-the-top as many of the skyscrapers that grace the city of Dubai, this Magento catalog boasts 1 million plus SKUs, 7K+ categories, and tens of thousands of images.

The lead project Architect and Developer, Mr. Chathura, was running into many performance and importing issues, and reached out to the aMiSTACX team for assistance.

One of the hardest issues aMiSTACX faces when working with new customers is to change their mind-set of how a site is built, and what components to keep and what components to trash.

Not following the Internet “Hype” is the key!

The first major issue was addressing the fact that most Magento module and theme vendors are selling antiquated products designed and built on Magento 1 with php 5.6, that have been haplessly ported over to Magento 2.  Additionally, most of these vendors out of India and Asia are using low-cost untrained outsourced labor with no incentive for maximum perfection.

The aMiSTACX team immediately made some foundational adjustments to make sure SupplyApp’s project would not only be achievable, but also be customer usable.

  • Use of S3 Titanium for Magento 2 [3-Tier, S3R-Alpha Media, AWS RDS MySQL]
  • Scrap their team Asia Marketplace theme and extend Magento’s default Luma.
  • Disable all modules not in use, and limit 3rd party modules. [Remove to improve!]
  • Use aMiSTACX’s new Ramjet FPC booster and S3R-Alpha.

After overcoming import issues, menu issues, and database performance issues, aMiSTACX decided to step in and design a custom caching module for use with SupplyApp’s site as performance was still not acceptable.

Redis and Magento’s FPC system were just not up to the task, and after a horrible experience with another vendor’s cache warmer, aMiSTACX designed and implemented our first cache booster, now called Ramjet. It was an amazing first for both the customer, Magento, and aMiSTACX.

Frontend load times dropped from about 15-30 seconds to about 1.7 seconds. [Benchmarked from GTMetrix, Canada to Germany]

aMiSTACX’s A51 management dashboard for AWS was set up to help automate, organize, and manage SupplyApp backups for both EC2s and RDS instances.

Fast forward to 2020, and after a successful supplyapp.com launch, aMiSTACX has assisted once again in the performance arena. Seems performance of the S3 Titanium stack was impacted after SA installed a 3rd-party store-currency switcher.

The timing was more than perfect as aMiSTACX had our new store routing module, Orbital, in Beta. Originally, Orbital was designed only for a Magento Multi-Store, but our dev team quickly added a currency-switcher to accommodate Magento’s single store mode, and we were off to the races.

As SupplyApp.com keeps growing, and as aMiSTACX keeps helping with their ambitious goals, aMiSTACX has also provided our new PDFDelta product catalog to PDF exporter, tweaks and upgrades to our S3Sonic RDS read replica module, and much more.

Not too many very large Magento catalog shops can say they are running 1 Million+ SKUs on Apache, but SupplyApp can ?

Overall our DevOps team enjoys the challenge of working on these types of projects. We get real-life issues and feedback on our stacks, and our customers get the benefits from our continual improvement.

As we love to say, “Your success is our success!”

~ Lead_Robot