Checkout database 14× faster under load
An online retailer's PostgreSQL cluster buckled every campaign day. Query rewrites, index redesign, and connection pooling took p95 checkout latency from 2.1 s to 150 ms — on the same hardware.
The challenge
Every marketing campaign brought the checkout to its knees: p95 latency spiked past two seconds, carts were abandoned, and the on-call rota was burning out. The proposed fix was doubling the hardware budget.
Our approach
We profiled the workload first. The findings: three unindexed hot queries, a bloated orders table that had never been repacked, and application servers opening one connection per request. We rewrote the queries, redesigned the index strategy, introduced PgBouncer pooling, and set up continuous monitoring.
The result
p95 checkout latency fell from 2.1 s to 150 ms on the existing hardware. The retailer has run every campaign since without a single database incident, and the monitoring now flags regressions before customers feel them.
Facing something similar?
We'll tell you what a comparable fix looks like for your environment — with numbers, not promises.