Inpho's Critical Processes Back up to Speed with Pythian

INPHO’S CRITICAL PROCESSES BACK UP TO SPEED WITH PYTHIAN’S EXPERTISE

InPho Interactive is Australia’s leading business-to-business technology provider, specializing in mobile applications—interactive voice response (IVR) products, and web and e-mail services. Providing clients with fast and intuitive services is InPho’s core business. Their database system performance and service delivery are key in meeting their business goal.

Critical Issues

Customers and users became frustrated by the poor performance of Inpho’s SMS batch process which took upwards of 40 seconds to complete. This performance bottleneck forced InPho to compromise on the volume of SMS batches the SMS gateway could process. To address the problem InPho engaged Pythian to conduct a remote database performance and tuning audit of the main Oracle database, which supports InPho’s SMS gateway applications. In addition, InPho had several new SMS, Chat and IVR applications to roll out with different versions of MySQL to balance. All of these new services needed to scale gracefully and offer redundancies in the event of a server failure. Pythian was engaged to audit the runtime environment to reduce service delivery risk.

We Provided

To address the SMS performance issues Pythian conducted an audit and found several major bottlenecks in the database architecture that were limiting the throughput of the mainSMS batch process. To resolve the issue, Pythian used Oracle’s function-based indexes to allow the SMS batch process to complete much faster. Pythian conducted the necessary code change to the index structure and the programming changes to the Oracle PL/SQL packages. The entire operation was remotely coded, tested, and transitioned to production with no disruption. Pythian’s MySQL experts worked with InPho’s team to determine the business and scaling requirements for the new SMS, Chat, and IVR applications. Pythian then provided detailed guidance on structuring InPho’s MySQL database architecture to deliver performance and availability under load. To ensure scalability, Pythian recommended the separation of applications onto individual servers and MySQL instances. For cost effective redundancy, Pythian recommended a secondary slave server running multiple MySQL slave instances that also ran specific MySQL versions as required by each application.

Result

The SMS gateway application response times dropped from 40 seconds to 2 seconds per batch. Consequently, several of InPho’s customers noted the dramatically improved performance and responsiveness of the application. In addition, InPho’s new SMS, Chat and IVR applications run within a MySQL database architecture, which is both application centric and scalable. The new environment offers cost-effective redundancy and can scale with virtually no disruption. InPho engaged Pythian to remotely implement the recommended solution and to continue monitoring the environment on a 24×7 basis.

Technologies

Oracle MySQL

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Overview