Haverstick helps retailer close the sale
The Client
A major retailer of luxury consumer goods
The Challenge
The client implemented a new point-of-sale (POS) system based on Windows technology. Windows NT workstations communicated with a backend database running Windows 2000 Server and SQL 2000. When the system went online, the retailer began to experience major performance problems and outages that were preventing store personnel from completing transactions, disappointing customers and negatively affecting store revenue.
The Haverstick Approach
Haverstick’s application team met with the client’s technical support team to get a technical description of the problem, and with the in-store staff to understand the functional problem. From here, we captured and analyzed data on the network and on SQL server utilization. Our analysis showed that the SQL server was experiencing frequent periods of 100 percent utilization, causing slowdowns throughout the system. When we focused on the SQL server, we found two more critical factors: there was excessive swapping of memory to disk, and during certain transactions, the front-end POS application read the same data from the same file thousands of times.
To resolve the swapping problem, we added memory to the SQL server. The second problem was resolved by adjusting the application to cache the information and read it only once during a transaction.
The Result
The retailer’s new POS system is functioning without performance slowdowns or outages. Customers can once again make purchases easily, and store revenues have returned to their previous volume. | 
