Clients
Overnight Payment System
Sinara was appointed to investigate a specific IT performance problem at a UK peer-to-peer lending company. A critical sub-system, the daily overnight Repayments process, was sometimes taking too long, causing an adverse impact on normal operations. Sinara carried out a technical analysis and recommended practical areas for improvement which resulted in reducing processing time by almost a half.
Sinara’s investigation comprised the following activities:
- Review of historical SQL Server metrics, logs and query usage
- Understanding and review of the database schema
- Identification of key process database procedures
- Examination of overnight diagnostics from the production environment
- Set up of a reproducible test environment
- Detailed profiling and experimentation within the test environment
Sinara identified a number of areas for potential improvement and, importantly, were able to measure the effectiveness or otherwise of possible solutions. A report was produced detailing a number of practical and cost-effective recommendations for improving efficiency:
- Slight restructuring of the Repayments process to improve performance by between one third and one half
- Reconfiguration of the SQL Server database files
- Archive and purging of unneeded historical data
- Regular database index reorganisation
- Rationalisation of database indexes