Helping a Leading Provider of Transcription and Electronic Reporting Services Identify and Resolve Drupal Application Performance Issues

The Goals:

Our client has two applications written in Drupal: a customer facing portal called the New Hampshire Storefront, and an online rich media management system called The Court Record Online v2 (TCRO2). Whenever heavy audio files had to be imported from the storefront to TCRO2, there would be a significant degradation in the website performance, bringing it to an almost halt. Files would take a long time to be imported, and failures were common or would not get reported by the system.

The goal was to solve these problems that they faced.

The Requirements:

The company approached several Drupal agencies across India. We were one of the only two companies which could understand the challenges faced by them. And, we were the only company which was ready to spend time to review the code base with respect to the problem statement. During this exploration, we identified the root cause of the issue as batch processing of files. This convinced the organization about our ability to solve the issues faced.

Once convinced about our client focus and capabilities, they sanctioned a ‘Discovery Phase’ to solve the known problems and identify improvements in specific areas of the system by following our Agile processes. At the end of this phase, we delivered a report which identified the various issues in the workflow which led to the performance degradation. We also identified more issues with the application that put it at a security risk. Because of some of these issues, the costing calculations were also not accurate. All of this had a direct impact on the productivity levels of the company's managers as the system frequently required manual intervention.

The Solution:

• Team and process: For the implementation phase, our team involved in the discovery phase, a Business Analyst and a Tech Architect, continued on the project. A dedicated development team was staffed, in addition for this phase. The manager from the customer’s side was an active participant throughout this process.
  The most critical pieces of the system were taken up first leading to early demonstration of success. Through the sprints, the team took on additional tasks, while some low priority tasks were dropped from the development cycle. Having a Product Owner from the client, who was being involved daily with the team, enabled this flexibility.
• Architectural changes: We replaced cron with REST API. This improved performance and brought stability to the system. Now, there is a trigger system in place that results in faster file transfer to TCRO2 from New Hampshire Storefront. The improved synchronization between the two systems has ensured that the website functions smoothly during the transfer process as well.
• Improving data maintenance: We re-wrote the code for our client's automatic data maintenance module to handle automatic file cleanup of files. This cleans the system off unnecessary data that would otherwise clog the system.
• Managing security risks: We re-configured the file settings to ensure high privacy to files and data. We also implemented OAuth (authentication), another layer of security. To improve the security further, the communication between the two systems was changed from XML to JSON.

Post-launch, as new orders were received, the bottleneck shifted to another part of the system (which was not part of original scope with us). This was unforeseen and brought the systems down. Our team responded immediately. Having a dedicated team working in the Agile model ensured that the team could react in time. Another sprint was added and the bottlenecks were eliminated.