Problem

The client quickly grew the number of paying customers as well as the number of textual reviews analyzed on a daily basis. The existing backend infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the increase, and the app became very slow, sometimes taking more than 60 seconds to load a page.
Brainstorm was involved to refactor the existing backend infrastructure without affecting the ReactJS frontend greatly by optimizing API endpoints, database structure, and database querying.

Solution

Two Brainstorm backend developers worked on refactoring the entire backend and made significant changes to the structure of the codebase by making the project more organized, and straightforward, and by isolating different services. Some of the greatest changes included:

• Changing the database structure to optimize slow queries.
• Introducing an ORM for more structured querying.
• Developed a utility to centralize query generation to avoid unnecessary joins.
• Reduced the total number of API calls through result cashing.
• Providing full support until the production release.

Results

Changes developed by Brainstorm engineers reduced the average timing of complex database queries by 10x and reduced the total number of API calls by 20%. The platform speed-up was noticed by the clients, and the project was delivered with high praise from the CTO.