Three times the orders, same hardware

The problem

A growing platform was losing orders at peak. Every incoming order ran two counting queries against a table that kept growing, so the system got slower exactly when it was busiest.

What we did

Profiled the order path end to end, removed the two blocking counts, and added a capacity measurement so the ceiling is now known rather than guessed.

Result

Throughput went from 1.0 to 3.0 orders per second.

Built with

• Python
• Flask
• PostgreSQL
• Caddy