Chewy | Gatling Customer Story

Part I Introduction
Part II Chewy’s exponential traffic growth caused performance challenges
Part III Chewy established a performance testing framework with Gatling Enterprise
Part IV Chewy’s continuous load testing with Gatling Enterprise

Part I Introduction

"We did a POC and evaluated multiple tools. Gatling was chosen because it was developer friendly, could be hosted in AWS, allowed us to spin up unique injectors for each test, supported lots of concurrent tests running in parallel without impacting each other, and the Gatling Enterprise UI was easy to use."

Chris Winkler

Associate Director, Software Engineering

At a Glance

Exponential growth in website traffic in the US during and after pandemic
Managing performance issues that might occur due to BOT traffic
Creation of a Performance Testing Framework and team with Gatling Enterprise
Daily load testing with an average of 500+ load tests and 100+ simulations per month
20.4M happy, active users with an average visit duration of 08:19 min in 2023

Challenge

Chewy's e-commerce website had steady sales since the beginning. However, in 2020, Americans shifted to online shopping at the onset of the pandemic. The company saw exponential traffic growth, peaking during the holiday seasons.

Since the end of the pandemic, Chewy noticed that BOT traffic and web scrapers are increasingly sophisticated. It might have affected actual users if they attempted to filter all BOT traffic. To combat this, Chewy must ensure it can handle multiples of its standard traffic to avoid performance issues even if it faces heavy BOT traffic.

Chewy's tremendous growth and aim to maintain its impeccable customer service caused an urgent need to create a performance testing framework from scratch with a reliable load testing tool to manage site traffic.

Solution

With Gatling Enterprise, Chewy started load testing daily, with several simulations to replicate traffic spikes and production traffic. Based on the simulations, they changed the architecture of certain pages, making them more resilient and protecting them from large amounts of traffic.

Currently, the performance team is continuously doing CI/CD testing, including soak and stress tests, to maintain the website's stability and uninterpreted customer service

Results

In 2023, Chewy had 20.4M happy, active customers with 08:19 minutes average visit duration with 450+ developers actively using Gatling Enterprise.

Chewy averages 500+ load tests per month and 100+ monthly distinct simulations. During the peak holiday season, the company has 1300+ load tests and 98+ monthly distinct simulations to manage their massive spike in website visits and sales and assess their daily performance.