Optimising wedding aggregator code in Ruby on Rails

Let's look at some statistical information. According to RBC and Avito Services analysts, a survey of 10,000 respondents throughout country recorded a 2-fold increase in demand for organising weddings and graduations in the summer of 2023. The greatest growth was observed in organising buffets (up 141% year-on-year), ordering toastmasters for events (up 98%), and all services related to wedding organisation (up 92%). In the premium segment, artists have been invited more often to weddings and corporate events, despite noticeable fee increases.

Choosing rings for a wedding

Among the top five main components of wedding costs, respondents included a cake (42% voted for it), flowers (35%), balloons (34%), a photographer or cameraman (29%), and rented premises (25%). Approximately one-fifth of newly wedded (22%) organise private events on their own, including baking cakes, buying bouquets in flower shops, organising photography, etc. The remaining 78%, according to the study, turn to specialists for help.

Analysts call weddings the most expensive celebrations. Every fifth person who had a wedding in the summer of 2023 spent between $1,111 to $3,333 on the organisation, and almost a quarter (23%) spent more than $3,333. Additionally, 3% of respondents organised a ceremony costing $11,111 or more.

On wedding marketplaces, including WEDby.ME, it is possible to transfer all the hassles of organising a celebration to professionals, allowing newlyweds, their parents, and friends to spend time with loved ones.

The bride's bouquet

The company's owners sought specialists to refine and provide ongoing technical support for a website written in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and JavaScript. The most important components of online service quality are the speed and ease of site use.

We began the audit by describing the intricacies of the current implementation and creating a list of defects. The next step involved the senior developer preparing a detailed technical specification for code refactoring, describing redundant and suboptimal code. The customer agreed to optimise the integration code with the BookBanket service.

Performance issues

Code refactoring

The main achievement of the refactoring was a significant reduction in the rendering time of the “Banquet Halls” section on the server. This was achieved by transferring interaction with the BookBanket service to a background process running on a schedule. Previously, data was received in real time, which greatly slowed down the process. Restaurant parameters required for sorting and filtering are now saved to the site database, and SQL queries have been redesigned and optimised.

Before refactoring, all restaurants and banquet halls were queried, not just those needed by the current page. Under the previous implementation, adding new restaurants would inevitably increase already unacceptable page load times.

Artist for a wedding

Several tables contained obsolete records that were no longer used. For such tables, scheduled cleaning and packing scripts have been added. For example, the time for the simplest query to the vieweds table was 13 seconds, and the number of records was about 10 million. Records older than 120 days were deleted, and packing the table with the VACUUM command reduced the size from 9 gigabytes to 37 megabytes.

Before refactoring, the server cache was used irrationally. It was not used to reduce the number of API requests or database calls but as an intermediate means of storing and transferring data between multiple methods. The values from the cache were not reused during the server rendering process but were constantly updated, which did not provide any performance gain. Some fields stored in the cache required sorting and searching. Instead of using fast DBMS tools, the task was performed in an application-level language, resulting in more complex code, an increase (not a decrease!) in the number of database queries, and a loss of performance. Excess code that turned out to be meaningless after refactoring was removed.

Banquet halls for weddings

A restaurant was hidden if, for example, a network error occurred during an API request or if BookBanket was temporarily unavailable. Since the errors were random, requests for the same page would display different lists of establishments.

In addition to refactoring, multiple changes were made to the layout and functionality of several sections of the site. Defects in ranking banquet halls by price and cost calculation methods were corrected, improving the user experience. Adding SMS authorization to the site also made the user experience more convenient. Finally, bugs with the page counter and paginator were fixed.

Instead of a conclusion

“I'm a wedding photographer. And do you know what's the saddest thing about my profession? The fact that I have regular customers.”

There is confidence that work on the site will always be relevant. Over time, new functions, sections, and business areas will be added. After all, the number of weddings does not change much from year to year, and for every 10 marriages, there are up to 7 divorces (Rosstat statistics for 2021), constantly replenishing the pool of potential clients. This means there will be plenty of work for wedding aggregators.