How Sonepar ensured optimal e-commerce platform performance with Gatling Enterprise

Performance stability

Sonepar’s e-commerce platform was growing in complexity with multiple microservices and frontends. While functional testing covered most aspects, ensuring the platform’s performance under heavy loads became a priority. The team needed a solution to validate performance for critical processes such as product searches, checkouts, and large catalog displays.

High traffic scalability

The platform had to handle a significant volume of daily transactions. Sonepar’s professional users couldn’t afford slowdowns or failures, especially during peak periods. The company needed to ensure scalability for their platform across multiple countries, each with varying levels of traffic and load.

Complex frontend-backend interactions

As a global platform, Sonepar’s system integrated various services (e.g., product catalogs, pricing, and customer-specific conditions). The team faced challenges in monitoring response times from backend services, especially when users searched for products or interacted with dynamic pricing features.

1. Increased load testing capacity

By integrating Gatling Enterprise into their pipeline, Sonepar’s development teams could simulate up to 720 virtual users simultaneously, far beyond what their previous tools could handle. This simulation mirrored real-world conditions, allowing them to evaluate the system’s behavior during peak usage.

2. Web core vitals tracking

Sonepar closely monitors key Web Core Vitals (LCP, FCP, TBT, and TTFB) to optimize SEO and ensure a fast, seamless user experience. With Gatling, they were able to generate load and measure these metrics in both pre-production and production environments, identifying potential performance bottlenecks before they impacted end-users.

3. Enhanced testing of microservices

Gatling allowed Sonepar to load-test their frontend and backend services independently. This flexibility enabled the team to identify performance issues at various stages of the user journey—from product searches to checkout—and isolate bottlenecks in individual microservices, improving their ability to deliver a smooth user experience.

4. SaaS-driven efficiency

Sonepar benefited from the scalability of Gatling Enterprise’s SaaS platform. Rather than overloading their internal resources, they leveraged Gatling’s cloud infrastructure to run larger and more complex simulations, without the need for heavy local machine resources.

• Reduced performance issues in production: Sonepar dramatically decreased instances of performance degradation during high-traffic periods by identifying and resolving bottlenecks in their API and microservices through Gatling load tests.
  
  
• Improved deployment confidence: By integrating Gatling into their pre-production pipeline, Sonepar now runs comprehensive load tests before each release, ensuring every deployment meets their performance standards.
  
  
• Optimized frontend performance: With continuous tracking of Web Core Vitals, Sonepar significantly improved their SEO ranking and reduced bounce rates by enhancing page load times and minimizing checkout delays.
  
  
• Enhanced scalability: Simulations of up to 720 concurrent users ensured that Sonepar’s platform could scale efficiently to meet growing user demands, maintaining performance even during peak periods.

• Higher load capacity: Gatling Enterprise allowed Sonepar to simulate a higher volume of users without draining internal resources, improving their ability to test realistic traffic loads.
  
  
• Clear, actionable reporting: Gatling’s UI made it easy for both technical and non-technical users to interpret test results and take corrective action, a significant improvement over their previous tools.
  
  
• CI/CD integration: The seamless integration of Gatling Enterprise into Sonepar’s CI/CD pipeline enabled automated load tests at key stages of development, reducing manual intervention and speeding up testing cycles.

Sonepar plans to expand their use of Gatling Enterprise by increasing the frequency of load tests and integrating even deeper into their development processes. 

They aim to set performance thresholds for each new feature before it is merged into production, ensuring no regressions in user experience. As the platform continues to grow across Europe and North America, Sonepar is committed to maintaining high performance and scalability with Gatling Enterprise.