We have a solution how to save milliseconds or even seconds for your application’s speed—a thorough analysis of the performance map and a couple of freshly invented optimization tools can accelerate all requests fivefold. By the way, this optimization also reduced the number of resources required for database maintenance that allowed cutting the cost of cloud storage. These are the lessons we learned during a two-month project with the gaming startup Mayhem.
Founded in 2017, Mayhem focuses on automatic game tracking, leaderboards, and a global chat to bring gamers together in tournaments, leagues, and other real-time community-driven events. The project raised a $4.7M round from Y Combinator and Accel.
Mayhem website
What does the “real-time” feature mean for the tournament-based games hitting the industry, with thousands of leaders competing in the same game simultaneously? They demand a quick setup, no high lags or noticeable delays, and have little tolerance for unscheduled downtimes.
Therefore, performance is crucial, and milliseconds can mean the difference between success and failure, not only for players but for game-tracking apps as well.
GraphQL for satisfying gameplay
The project we recently finished required the optimization of GraphQL API performance, with two Martian backend developers orchestrating workloads to hit the performance goal. It’s a good example of a seriously interesting performance optimization task, as we had to not only detect all the bottlenecks but build a solution to resolve them on our own.
For the last couple of years, Martians have been increasingly practicing GraphQL for customers’ production applications. In many scenarios, building applications with GraphQL is more time-saving and high-performing in comparison with building with REST APIs.
Evil Martians engineering team has an open source-centric approach. On this path, we’ve already designed several open source tools that help developers improve critical areas of their Ruby and Rails applications. In this project with Mayhem, we had a chance to use and enhance them further (more on that later). On top of that, we added some brand-new open source solutions addressing GraphQL-on-Ruby performance that can be helpful for the ecosystem, as they already brought Mayhem some application performance improvements.
Here are some results and highlights that reveal how we nailed the task.
