Elephant Ventures

As one of Elephant Venture's big clients was getting ready to launch an important new product, the founders realized it wasn’t ready for the public eye. While the site looked great in development, slow page loads and a host of other Drupal-related performance issues threatened to sabotage all their hard work. Elephant Ventures was tasked with fixing these issues before launch, and recommended Pantheon to their client as a way to deliver large, custom videos on demand while consistently maintaining high performance.

We take an iterative approach to software development. Pantheon complements our team so we can always be shipping. The platform’s on-demand scalability and performance tuning were critical to our client’s successful launch, helping us reduce page loads from 3 minutes to under 6 seconds.

Art Shectman, President and Founder

A Bad Case of Change-Control-Itis

Slow page loads and backend technical problems were a huge concern at the beginning of this project. The code had passed through many hands, suffering from what Elephant Ventures President and Founder Art Shectman called change-control-itis. “There were all kinds of bad practices,” he said. “The system had legacy code that was no longer being used and other edits that broke the site’s drupal upgrade path. We were called in at the last minute to help take it to the finish line. Page load times were a particular challenge, thanks in part to the large sizes of the video assets and API latency”.

Why Recommend Pantheon?

Elephant Ventures prides themselves on high-quality engineering talent and iterative approach to software development. They only recommend technology to their clients that complement that—which is why they recommended Pantheon. The built-in workflow and infrastructure makes it easy for them to focus on rapidly iterating to solve the client’s problems. “We’ve never met a fire we couldn’t put out,” Shectman said. “As an agile development shop, our team really values compartmentalizing work and putting it back into clients’ hands. You don’t have to argue over change control. All your time and energy can go into collaborating to create the next, most valuable piece of business software.” Additionally, their client could count on Pantheon’s on-demand scalability, performance tuning, and launch support. 

A Triple-Threat Solution: Performance Tuning, QA Testing, and On-Demand Scalability

The engagement started with a performance tuning assessment. After identifying places for improvement, both teams worked in parallel using Multidev feature branching to make the changes necessary for launch. “We compartmentalized ongoing development work and QA branches from our performance-tuning work,” Shectman said. “Everyone was very happy to be working this way.” The firm also leveraged manual software testing services provided by Elephant’s sister-company, ULTRA Testing, in conjunction with Pantheon’s automated performance testing and pre-launch status checks. Before launch, load testing was done to ensure the site would be scalable when an influx of traffic hit on launch day.

Page Loads Drop by 97%

By the time the new site launched, page load times had decreased from three minutes to less than six seconds—and under two seconds for pages that had already loaded and been cached. “Once our clients saw their page load times reflecting industry standards, they were relieved and ready for launch,” Shectman said. Pantheon’s on-demand scalability and performance, onboarding and launch support, and performance testing aided the firm’s efforts, allowing them to launch with confidence.