Performance engineering
Planning for peak season without a war room
Ramadan, White Friday and year-end bring predictable spikes. Here is how to treat them as a capacity plan.
Alvortek Performance Team, . 1 min read
In the Gulf, peak traffic is predictable. Ramadan evenings, White Friday, salary days and year-end close arrive on schedule. Yet many teams still meet them with a war room and a hope that autoscaling holds.
Model the load you will actually see
Use last year’s traffic shape, not an average. Peaks in this region are often short and sharp, such as the hour after iftar, and averages hide them.
Test the whole journey
Load-test complete user journeys including payment gateways, identity providers and third-party APIs. The bottleneck is frequently outside your own code.
Know your limits before you need them
- Database connection pools and lock contention
- Rate limits on partner and government APIs
- Licence caps on middleware and observability tools
- Cold-start times when autoscaling triggers
Practise the failure
Run a game day a month before the peak. Decide in advance which features degrade gracefully, so the checkout keeps working when recommendations do not.