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