COMPANY:         Softaria

FOUNDED:          2002

EMPLOYEES:       ~ 50

INDUSTRY:          COMPUTER SOFTWARE SERVICES

Softaria specializes in system creation for automation of business processes and product use on the Internet. These systems are accessible in any part of the world across various devices and are orientated towards long-term, stable performance within the client’s infrastructure.

An online, browser based, gaming client of Softaria has a product with over 500K registered users per game and heavy daily traffic. Servers are carefully monitored to ensure servers are alive and with optimal performance. When the servers can’t be reached, thread dumps are created and servers are restarted.

CHALLENGE: Poor Server Performance Causing Player Frustration

There was a recent rash of server restarts which resulted in over 400MB of thread dumps in a short period of time. “With this volume of thread dump files, it was nearly impossible for a manual analysis,” said Roman Kuzmin, Softaria CEO. “We realized we needed a tool that can quickly and reliably analyze the files and provide actionable results. This is when we found fastThread tool.”

SOLUTION: Selecting The Right Tool For The Job

fastThread is a universal tool that will parse and analyze thread dumps written in any language that runs on the JVM. It converts Java, Scala, Jython, JRuby thread dumps to useful information for root cause analysis (RCA) in matter of seconds. Designed with intelligent patterns, you can trace the problem right down to the exact class, method and even line number which caused the application to crash. It is DevOps engineers favorite tool to troubleshoot complex production problems.

BENEFITS: For The Company And Their Customers

  • fastThread found over 900 threads running the same read operation
  • Problem identification took less than few minutes
  • Don’t have to download, install the tool. Just had to upload the thread dumps.
  • Intuitive dashboard made problem identification simple

RESULTS: Pinpointing The Issue For Performance Degradation

“The problem turned out to be a humorous one,” Roman Kuzmin, Softaria CEO stated. “The game gives players bonus points for each new player the user invites to the game with a cap of 100 invitations.” Roman Kuzmin continues, “but because of a security hole in one of our partners’ social networks, one ‘smart’ guy was able to write a script and register more than 25k invitees.” This made the servers hang and ultimately restarted. Softaria knew there was a performance issue within the system. The best way to really dive in and quickly identify the issue is through careful analysis of the thread dumps, which pinpointed to the exact cause.

RESOLUTION: Summary Statement

Once fasThread pointed out the root cause, Softaria team immediately made fix in the code. It stopped the server crashes and helped the users to start using gaming application without any issues.

ABOUT TIER1APP

Since its inception, Tier1app has been serving thousands of enterprises through the next generation DevOps tools: GCeasy and fastThread. Now it is proven again that our world-class tools have a real impact on company’s business processes, reach better customer satisfaction and achieve greater success.