Case Study: ideeli achieves higher throughput and stable peak MySQL performance with Percona Server (XtraDB) from Percona

Percona Server with XtraDB Puts Flash in ideeli’s Flash Sales

ideeli is a members-only online shopping club built on Ruby on Rails that runs time-limited “flash sales” with traffic spikes of up to 40x. As traffic grew on AWS, ideeli’s MySQL servers began experiencing periodic, severe performance spikes—simple queries would hang for seconds, Threads_running climbed past 100, and HAProxy request queues formed during peak events. Percona’s investigation identified query-cache scalability issues and InnoDB internal contention as the root causes.

Percona reconfigured the query cache and upgraded ideeli’s database to Percona Server with XtraDB. The result was dramatically reduced load‑balancer queueing, much higher and more stable throughput (peak queries per second nearly doubled), and faster, more predictable latency—the average query time fell from 721 μs to 538 μs (around 0.5 ms) even as database traffic increased.

ideeli