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ClickFunnels uses Readyset to reduce its ever increasing database workload & boost query performance for applications
5 min read
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2 months ago
Leading marketing & lead-gen platform uses Readyset’s database scaling and query caching solution to save on AWS Aurora MySQL costs
About the Customer
ClickFunnels is a leading platform that empowers businesses to build, launch, and optimize online sales funnels quickly and efficiently. By providing a comprehensive suite of tools, ClickFunnels allows users to create landing pages, sales pages, order forms, and membership sites without requiring extensive technical skills or coding knowledge. It is an all-in-one solution that is great for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and digital marketers alike who need a streamlined approach to converting website visitors into paying customers. Beyond funnel creation, ClickFunnels also offers services like email marketing, A/B testing, and upsell/downsell functionality, making it a robust platform for businesses aiming to scale their online presence and maximize revenue.
Customer Challenge
Despite its user-friendly approach, ClickFunnels’ rapid growth and increasing user interactions posed significant challenges for its underlying MySQL database infrastructure on AWS Aurora. As the platform scaled, managing millions of queries and maintaining fast response times became critical to sustaining customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Traditional database solutions, such as read replicas, were becoming costly and inefficient, prompting ClickFunnels to seek more advanced methods to handle the complex demands of their growing business. This need to optimize performance while controlling expenses drove the decision to explore innovative solutions for scaling database performance.
Customer Results
To address these challenges, ClickFunnels adopted Readyset, a caching solution designed to enhance MySQL query performance, alleviate pressure on existing database read replicas. The deployment involved multiple Readyset instances configured in a round-robin setup, integrated with ProxySQL servers to manage traffic distribution and redundancy. The entire deployment took less than a couple of days to get up and running in production. This architecture combining Readyset and ProxySQL, AWS Aurora and Aurora allowed ClickFunnels to optimize query execution while maintaining a robust and reliable database environment, without the need for any changes to existing application code.
Percona Monitoring & Management (PMM) was utilized to continuously monitor and maintain the health and performance of the environment.
During the implementation process, the team identified key queries contributing to high database loads and mirrored these to Readyset to build a warm cache of frequently accessed data. By progressively redirecting traffic to Readyset, ClickFunnels was able to dramatically reduce the workload on its read replicas and the upstream database - all while boosting, not compromising, on query performance. With this strategic approach, ClickFunnels is now set up to save thousands of dollars on slow and expensive database read replicas every month while supporting the growing demands of modern, data-driven applications.
Solution Overview
ClickFunnels uses Readyset to handle the following key challenges - 1) reducing the workload on upstream instances of AWS Aurora for MySQL including its read replicas and 2) providing better query performance for its applications.
Today, Readyset is deployed in two distinct application environments at ClickFunnels. Each application environment uses a combination of two Readyset instances configured in a round-robin setup to handle traffic, ensuring efficient load distribution, and improving overall redundancy. The deployment also took advantage of ProxySQL for routing queries all without the need to bring down the applications at any point in time. The setup used three ProxySQL servers, which were responsible for routing specific query traffic to the Readyset instances. This configuration of Readyset allowed for both optimized query performance while reducing the load on the primary databases.
“ClickFunnels was able to introduce Readyset to its production environment in just a couple of weeks and reduce the workload on Aurora MySQL read replicas by over 85% bringing utilization down to just 6.6%. This allows us to greatly optimize our database infrastructure and get more from the same instance saving thousands needed to scale in future. - Javier Zon, Head of Platform, ClickFunnels”
The final piece of the architecture was Percona Monitoring & Management (PMM) which allowed ClickFunnels team to provide real-time insights for proactive monitoring for maintaining system reliability and efficiency.
Configuring the Solution
The cache hostgroup in ProxySQL was configured to contain Readyset servers with higher weight and to minimize risk during deployment, the current read replicas were set up to act as failover. Once deployed, Readyset started handling all of the traffic for this hostgroup, while the read replicas moved be idle. The configuration looked as below:
During the analysis phase of the implementation, the team has identified a subset of queries that were responsible for causing the majority of load in read replicas. Each one of those queries, were given a query rule in ProxySQL, initially, the destination of the query was kept the same, while mirroring the query to Readyset.
This allowed Readyset to receive a mirror of the production traffic and populate the most frequently asked entries into cache. Next, we monitored p99 latencies for each one of these queries using PMM to ensure expected performance results. We observed a consistent drop across the board for all queries being served by Readyset down to milliseconds with an order of magnitude increase in throughput.
Once the queries were warm, ClickFunnels migrated from mirror traffic to Readyset to redirect the actual queries to Readyset. From this point onwards, Readyset was responsible for serving the queries.
Results
Once deployed, Readyset significantly reduced database load by offloading queries from read replicas, showcasing exceptional performance while handling around 5,000 queries per second (QPS) with only 6.6% CPU utilization.
“It is a testament to Readyset's configurability and ease-of-deployment that ClickFunnels was able to deploy the solution in production without involving application developers. We were up and running in the first week and in production the next. -Javier Zon, Head of Platform, ClickFunnels”
Cache hits were delivered in 30-40µs at the p99 latency, and cache misses (up-query) were resolved in a maximum of 800µs at the p99 latency. Using Readyset, ClickFunnels is able to efficiently handle high query volumes with minimal resource consumption, providing a substantial performance boost to the database infrastructure.
ClickFunnels was able to achieve all this in an entirely transparent way without making any changes to the application code.
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