The advisory platform of our customer had been working fine for a long time, but it slowed down lately. Nothing was broken, but responding when you clicked something took a bit longer. It wasn’t a big problem initially, but people started noticing.

The system was still using the DB2 Database. It had done the job for years, but it was getting more of a challenge because of upcoming changes in the network infrastructure, which increased the latency by up to 40 milliseconds. It was hard to scale, slow to tune, and just not keeping up anymore. So, the team started talking about moving to a Database that could be deployed close to the Microservice layer. Postgres came up as a better option.

Postgres made sense. It’s fast, open-source, and easier to manage. But this wasn’t a tiny tool. We couldn’t just change it and hope for the best. The platform was essential to the business, so we had to ensure everything worked. And if we were going to change it, it needed to be better than before.

We tested everything performance, load, and how it handled users. We used Gatling to run tests that made it feel like real people were using the system. We set up complete monitoring from the start logs, metrics, and alerts so we could catch problems early.

The work wasn’t exciting. We checked logs, changed small things, and tested repeatedly. But it helped. Slowly, things got better. One fix at a time, and then we went live. We were ready for things to go wrong. But surprisingly, they didn’t. The system ran faster. It's a lot faster.

The client noticed right away. Their teams felt the difference. The platform didn’t look any different, but it worked better, faster, and smoother. That alone made a significant impact. I

In the end, there was no big secret. Just testing, tuning, and putting in the effort. Sometimes, you really can make something 44% faster overnight. But only if you do the hard work before that.

Keep up the great work! Happy Performance Engineering! #PerformanceEngineering #CoreBanking #DatabaseOptimization