Shari’s Berries rebuilds web site to meet February spike
Shari’s Berries, which sells chocolate-covered strawberries and other delicacies at Berries.com, rebuilt its site in the days before Valentine’s Day to accommodate an unexpected surge stemming from exposure on a cable TV show. After the site almost went down following its appearance on the FoodNetwork TV show several days before Valentine’s Day, Berries re-coded its site within a day to provide faster page downloads while handling record-high traffic, business applications manager Chris Schipper, who did all the work in-house, tells Internet Retailer. The change contributed to a 40% year-to-year increase in February orders, he adds.
When the FoodNetwork show aired on Sunday, Feb. 8, Schipper was expecting a doubling of orders and had programmed enough excess capacity to handle the increase. Instead, the usual number of orders increased fourfold and threatened to shut down the site. “It was almost like a denial of service attack,” Schipper says.
Using the Microsoft .Net web site development platform, Schipper re-coded the site to change the way visitors call up pages from a database. Under the old system, each time a visitor clicked to open the web page, it would take a few seconds to call up the page with all of its graphics from the database. But the new system is designed so that only the first visitor to the site after a ten-minute interval of inactivity must call up a page from the database, because download pages are stored in a memory cache for 10 minutes before they must pulled again from the database. So all subsequent visitors, as long as they visit within 10 minutes of each other, can instantly call up cached pages without having to pull from the database, Schipper says.
By Feb. 15, Berries surpassed the 1 million mark in number of page views, up from 500,000 for the entire month of February last year.
Not only does the re-coded site result in a better shopping experience with faster page views for visitors, but it lets Berries provide better performance without having to invest in additional network servers to accommodate the former number of hits to its database, Schipper says. “The pages appear faster and the site can handle more traffic, but with the same network hardware,” he says.
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