FlippedNormals
The Only Curated CG Marketplace
After months of troubleshooting and optimizing, we’re thrilled to share the results of a major performance overhaul on our marketplace platform. The changes were essential to address issues with stability, load times, and scalability, which were critical during peak times like sales events.
Key Improvements in Numbers
Our performance metrics tell the story best. Before optimization, load times across various pages were significantly slower, with some averaging as high as 57.97 seconds under load. Now, the highest load time is 6.38 seconds, with lows reaching an impressive 0.80 seconds. Average improvements across key pages range from 60% to over 90%, as highlighted in the table below:
| Page | Pre-Optimization (s) | Current (s) | Improvement (%) |
|---------------------|----------------------|-------------|-----------------|
| Homepage | 15.70 | 4.01 | 74.43% |
| Best Selling Tutorials | 8.34 | 3.11 | 62.66% |
| Latest Daz Products | 19.95 | 2.82 | 85.86% |
| FN Exclusives | 8.77 | 3.50 | 60.13% |
| Realistic Dino | 31.81 | 2.01 | 93.69% |
Optimizations That Made This Possible
1. Batching for Re-Indexing: One of the biggest improvements came from batching product re-indexing during high-load times, like sales. Previously, our system queried all products (currently 42k) at once, often leading to crashes and timeouts. With batching, resource usage is now more balanced, preventing these disruptions.
2. Switch to Eager Loading: We tackled performance bottlenecks by switching from lazy loading to eager loading. We also eliminated a lot of N+1 query issues by creating custom queries. This helped stabilize load times and reduced the strain on our database, making the site more responsive.
3. Session Management with Memcached: To address forced logouts during server restarts, we’ve implemented Memcached for session storage, rather than storing session cookies directly on our EC2 instances. This change should resolve the annoying log-out issue users experienced during crashes.
Results and Impact
With these optimizations in place, we’re hopeful for a smoother, more reliable experience across the board. We aim for an end to the frustrating forced logouts, more consistent delivery of emails (like verification and password resets), and stable load times, even during peak traffic. Our hope is that products no longer get “stuck” on sale due to job processing issues, providing a seamless experience for our users.
A Look Ahead
Achieving these performance improvements has been a long journey, but our platform is now stable and ready for the next phase of development. With the groundwork for performance laid, we’re excited to focus on new features and enhancements that will continue improving our marketplace experience.
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This performance overhaul is not just about speed; it’s about delivering a stable, enjoyable experience for our users, even during peak load times.
Since August 2022, we’ve been on a journey of growth and improvement. Despite the challenges of ongoing development, managing customer support, and addressing occasional slowdowns, we’ve kept up with our mission to bring creators and customers together. Back then, hitting the milestone of 20,000 products and welcoming 2,000 creators felt monumental.
Now, as of November 1, 2024, we’re excited to share that we’ve doubled those numbers. With 40,000 products and 3,000 creators, our platform has become a vibrant hub where talent and creativity thrive. We’ve also introduced a brand-new section dedicated to Daz 3D, expanding our reach to new customers and tapping into a whole new market segment.
For a long time we thought that we were the only ones suffering financially this past year. But more and more people started reaching out to us to ask what was going on with their sales.
We've spoken to creators on our own platform, competing platforms as well as other founders. Everyone is saying the same thing, more content is being output but it's generating less income than in previous years.
In some way it's been comforting to hear the same stories from other people, but it also leaves us in a precarious situation where we're not sure how to move forward with this information.
All we can do is keep producing better and better content!
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You know, it is always shown that after a downfall, the increase going to be much bigger
It's been a long ride!
To call it an upgrade doesn't really do the work justice. We've rebuilt FlippedNormals from the ground up.
We started this whole revamp about 2.5 years ago and we're happy to be able to say that it's done.
All in all we ended up with a cost of around $800k which is obviously a lot more than anyone of us expected. But when all is said and done, we have a product we're super proud of and that will allow us o focus on the things we're good at.
While we have a few smaller features planned for the future, for now we will go back to focus on content creation, adding more tutorials and resources.
It's been a long journey getting to this point.
We're in the final stages of wrapping up development for the next version of FlippedNormals. While the new version is live, we're still working out kinks and adding a few critical features.
But in the midst of this, with everything happening in the world, we're ecstatic to have passed this milestone. A number we had hoped to reach sooner, but at the moment we're just thankful that out business is still going strong!
Here's to the next $4,000,000!
It's been a slow year, we see this everywhere. But luckily, our creators are still making money!
Being able to add an additional $500k in commissions to creators over the last year is definitely a highlight for us in these trying times.
But with a more refined platform and more products than ever before I'm hopeful that it won't be too long until we reach $2M!
While we're still developing the website and struggling a bit keeping up with customer support as well as slowdowns, we've still managed to keep up with product uploads and on-boarding more creators.
20k products is a massive milestone for us, and more are coming in every day.
As well as reaching 2k creators that put their faith in us on our platform is very humbling.
We're very excited about the things to come as we get closer to the launch of our new platform.
$1,000,000 - What a phenomenal milestone!
Since the inception of FlippedNormals, we've always had one over arching goal in mind and that was for people to be able to make real money through our platform.
This number says it all, while we're still small compared to some of the bigger fish in this space, I can truly say, we're making a difference to our creators.
It took us 35 months to reach $500,000 paid out to our creators and we managed to add an additional 500k in just 13 months.
I can't wait to see what comes next!
We've been under a mountain of technical for a very long time. Anything we do to the site seems to create 10 more issue. On the 17th, Seemingly out of nowhere, the site just went down. We worked with a freelance developer to help us get everything up and running but things aren't running as smooth as they did before.
We never located the root cause, all we could do was to restore a backup going back a few days. This meant that we temporarily lost some user data, but were able to manually get them back into the system as we backed up the version of the site that had gone down as well.
This has been our life for a while now. The downside, aside from the stress, is that we aren't able to focus as much on growth as we would like. We're constantly putting out fires, and our customers are facing more issues than they should be.
Unfortunately, this also means that we haven't bee able to produce as much training and content for our YouTube channel which is a massive marketing channel for us.
This paired with the news that our new site id delayed certainly didn't boost morale.
All we can do is hope that the new version of the site that's being developed will help us overcome some of these issues.
Today is a sad, but not uncommon type of day in the world of development.
We've been informed by the company we've hired to build the new site, that they won't be able to deliver at the end of the month.
Increases in budget and timeline are not uncommon, however, this notice was very last minute and have left us a bit shaky about the process. But we remain hopeful.
The new timeline brings the budget up from 220k to 290k for our MVP and a new delivery date of June 18th.
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