Performance and reliability
Launch-day readiness
Before a launch, campaign, sale or broadcast, I load-test the system at the traffic you expect, find what breaks first, and fix it: caching, queues, database read paths, autoscaling and CDN rules. Then I'm on call during the event. It's the work behind the voting platform in my case studies, which had to stay fast for all 22 days of a campaign.
- Timeline
- Best started well before the event
- Price
- Fixed price for readiness; on-call cover priced per day
- Engagement
- Fixed-scope project
Is it a fit?
For
- Media and entertainment platforms before a broadcast or a public vote
- E-commerce teams before a sale or a product drop
- SaaS teams before a launch, a press moment or a large customer's go-live
Not for
- Events less than a week away with no staging environment: I can still help, but that's emergency work, not readiness
What you get
- A load model: expected peak, traffic shape and what counts as failure
- Load-test results against staging, with the first bottleneck found at each stage
- Caching, queueing and database changes that remove those bottlenecks
- Autoscaling and CDN configuration, pre-warmed for the event
- A runbook, dashboards and alerts, and on-call cover during the event
How it runs
- 01
Model the day
Expected visitors, the journeys they'll take, and where the writes happen. That becomes the load test.
- 02
Test until it breaks
Step the load up against a staging copy of production and record what fails first.
- 03
Fix in order
Remove each bottleneck, re-test, and repeat until the system holds the expected peak with headroom.
- 04
Rehearse and run
A dry run of the day, then live monitoring and on-call cover while it happens.
Typical stack: k6 · Apache JMeter · Redis · Laravel Queues · NGINX · Cloudflare · Google Cloud · AWS · Grafana
Questions
How much notice do you need?
Three to four weeks is comfortable: enough to test, fix and rehearse. With less, I focus on the changes with the biggest effect.
Can you help if the site is falling over right now?
Yes. Stabilization comes first (edge caching, shedding non-essential load, scaling the database), then the proper fixes.
How do you simulate the traffic?
With scripted load tests that follow real user journeys, run from several regions against a staging copy of production, stepping the load up until something breaks.
More in performance and reliability
- Performance and Core Web Vitals audit: Find out in five working days exactly why your application is slow, and what to fix first.
- Cloud, DevOps and cost: Deployments you don't dread, backups you've actually tested, and a cloud bill that makes sense.
Tell me about your project.
A short brief is enough to start. I’ll reply with questions, a suggested first step and when I could begin.