Success story

Travel search engine handling 300 million queries daily

After the first years the system was able to handle 50% greater traffic (over 300 million queries daily)

01. Problem

A travel search engine for a major hotel bookings aggregator company in the UK. Complete system redesign from a database-oriented processing based on a cluster of dozens SQL Server machines that was no scaling horizontally any longer due to architecture limitations. Most of the queries are read only (99%), about 200 million queries daily.

The main issue was caused by reaching the scalability limits – no further options to scale vertically with very limited horizontal scaling – adding a new SQL Server machine was increasing infrastructure cost by 2% and system throughput by only 0.1%.

Technical limitations started to become a serious business scaling issue – adding more clients and more hotel data became cost inefficient.

02. Solution

We studied the detailed system usage scenarios and statistics with the client and decided to extract the availability search into a separate cache layer based on in-memory data grid (IMDG) platform. This new solution holds in memory a complete set of data required to return a hotel availability information. We also implemented a custom, fast data loading mechanism to populate the memory grid from database as well as a message queue pipeline supporting incremental intraday data updates.

03. Results

Significant reduction of persistent database usage (SQL Server) and infrastructure cost down by 80%. Almost linear horizontal scalability of the search engine which is now based on in-memory processing with efficiency around 70%.

New business opportunities to scale the platform. After the first years of our solution in use the system was able to handle 50% greater traffic (over 300 million queries daily) with significant reduction of response times by 60%. More than 95% of queries are now served below a second.

The most surprising was the immediate commercial effect of the new implementation – revenue from the existing customers grew as they were now able to query the platform more frequently generating higher volumes.

 

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The features implemented have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from end-users. Stratoflow has an incredible technical expertise and a high degree of flexibility when it comes to changing project requirements.

Adam Hill

Chief Technology Officer, Legerity

They have impressively good knowledge of AI issues. Very responsive to any amendments and findings. Very good communication. We received a finished project which could be implemented into production shortly after testing.

CO-Founder & CTO

Circular Fashion Company

They provided superb service with seamless communication and a highly professional, technical approach. The team displays impressive technical expertise and are willing to share information and engage in constructive feedback.

Filip Stachnik

Operations Manager, Otwarte Klatki (part of Anima International)

They're very skilled technically and are also able to see the bigger picture. Stratoflow can actually think about solutions, not just the technical task at hand, which they've been assigned.

Arnd Jan Prause

Chief Operating Officer, musQueteer

Stratoflow delivered the website successfully within the timeframe and budget. They assured that the output met the set requirements. Overall, the team's performance was excellent and recommended for their exceptional technical business expertise. They've been able to deliver all of their work on time and within budget, which has been very impressive.

Lars Andersen

Founder & CEO, My Nametags

Travel sector rebound after the pandemic is complete. We have fantastic global coverage of travel data distribution due to mutual agreements and data exchange between aggregators. Competition for the best price of limited resources degradates margins.

How to win? Provide personalized experience and build your own products in the front-office. The missing bits: a traveller golden record collecting past activities and a AI/ML recommendation technology.

Michał Głomba

CEO at Stratoflow