Catch a batch: Making Mayhem 5 times more responsive

Milliseconds matter: that’s equally true for Olympic champions, online gamers, and gaming startups. Even little breakdowns in an online platform backend like excessive database calls or in-memory data manipulation can severely slow down the gaming servers’ response.But the good news is that a thorough analysis of the performance map and a couple of freshly invented optimization tools can accelerate all requests fivefold. By the way, this optimization also reduced the number of resources required for database maintenance that allowed cutting the cost of cloud storage. These are the lessons we learned during a two-month project with the gaming startup ​Mayhem.Founded in 2017, Mayhem focuses on automatic game tracking, leaderboards, and a global chat to bring gamers together in tournaments, leagues, and other real-time community-driven events. The project raised a $4.7M round from Y Combinator and Accel.