How we built the new KULTURISTIKA.COM

Bodybuilding.com has been around for 20 years and we thought we'd completely demolish it for our anniversary :-) We have been preparing for this demolition of the site we have been building for two years and thanks to the great development team from Netservis and technicians from IPEXO we buried what historically existed for 20 years in one night and started a new stage of existence on completely new software and server equipment.

But let's go back slightly before the new version was launched, it really wasn't that simple. I'll share with you how it all went.

Of course, first a thorough analysis of the current solution was carried out and then the new core system was built. Of course, it was also essential to save all the current and historical data (hundreds of thousands of users, orders, etc.) and ensure its consistency with the new version. This was not easy at all, unlike a standard shop in the case of bodybuilding, the data is extremely vertically linked across the magazine, the social part (user reviews, communication center), the e-shop and the Supertrainer part.

And so, during the development process, this whole venture has trained programmers more than a cyclist's first visit to the gym :-)

Of course, it was already clear that there was no possibility to use any common box solution and therefore a procedure was devised to use Netservis Webredaction, PHP, MySQL and Elasticsearch, which mainly provides listing and searching of products. Combined with the regular synchronization of a number of agendas from the Pohoda economic system, it was necessary to properly time the synchronization and the overwriting of data into user profiles. Pohoda remained as the system responsible for the calculation of most of the data, but some scripts had to be written on top of it, for example to adjust the prices of events to the correct currency.

At the same time, an effort was made to minimize the volumes of information transferred so that communication could be efficient and take place in the smallest possible time intervals without unnecessary demands on performance. This is further complicated by different price lists and action applications for different product variants, user groups, currencies and VAT rates.

The previous solution allowed some data to be corrected without linking to other parts of the system, this was functional but not sustainable in the long term. Thus, for example, there was a straightening in the points system for users, which, although it sometimes brought strange values, but in cooperation with the customer service line everything was hopefully resolved to the satisfaction of the customers.

Oh, and it wouldn't have been me if I hadn't thought a month before the launch that we would change the display of product variants for clothing that was out of line with the existing listings on the site. I wanted to do it quite specifically by color variants and so this deployment of the new structure became a gem, however it was necessary to launch this without any real testing on our development version to make it in time for the anniversary "demolition of bodybuilding". But our development team handled it brilliantly and the result was completely as I expected.

After the launch of the new version of bodybuilding, a new set of bugs became apparent under the load of customers, which we had to immediately address in the following week practically non-stop. Some of us protelefoned more than one day of clean time in one week. Thanks to an extremely efficient and loyal team, we managed to get the project off to a successful start after some tense moments.

Finally, after launch, we tackled optimization for Google Pagespeed Insights, which has undergone significant calculation changes over the past year. Thus, the process of downloading the site to users had to be significantly adjusted, including scripts directly from Google (Tag Manager, Google Fonts), which themselves were slowing down the loading process. We managed to "tune" the website perfectly in this respect.

Now we are still making small adjustments, polishing the functionality and preparing other new things for our customers, so that they can find everything they need for their healthy lifestyle and not only that, we want to make them happy shopping, getting quality information and to have fun in our soc part of the site. In short, to have fun on our website.

And how did we upgrade bodybuilding.com to a mega-powerful server infrastructure?

I will tell you in the next lines.

Of course, the new software development also brought with it a quite urgent change in server equipment and overall security.

The new bodyburistika.com now runs on extra powerful DELL AMD EPYC servers with 3D cache memory. Compared to the previous Intel Xeon Platinum processors, we have seen a manifold increase in performance in database operations, which is due to the processor itself in performance per thread, but also to its huge 3D cache memory, which is advantageous for database operations. The bandwidth between RAM and the processor is also exceptional thanks to the 8 channels and high clock speed. Disk operations are taken care of by an NVMe SSD array with performance that is also orders of magnitude better than the original solution.

In terms of networking, we upgraded our internal network infrastructure to 100/25Gb from nVidia/Mellanox.

The new eshop has been redesigned from the ground up and already works with the new php8 and to speed up searches we have deployed Elasticsearch which I wrote about in the introduction of this article. We've adjusted the database configuration for higher performance aligned with the infrastructure capabilities. All measures are mainly noticeable when using filters in the eshop.

We are protected against possible attacks by security devices from the market leader Fortinet + our own web infrastructure protection solution.

As a result, both the eshop and the magazine can react significantly faster. The menu and search logic of both the e-shop and magazine articles has been redesigned. If you want to find exercises for a selected batch it should be a breeze for you with the ability to limit the view to videos only. Creating an order in the eshop using your phone is also a breeze.

So we enter 2023 significantly strengthened. It will be our pleasure if you visit the improved bodybuilding.com magazine e-shop regularly and find it an information well of the fitness world as well as a quality business partner in the supply of sports nutrition, fitness equipment and clothing.

In conclusion, I want to thank the whole team of bodybuilding and from my whole heart once again to the whole team of Netservice, who were not afraid to take on this great challenge, did not let us down and now I hope I can say that they have become our friends and I am very happy to have such a strong team behind me withwithout which we can create new things and of course thanks to the company IPEXO without which all this would not have happened and which also ensures the smooth operation of the servers and accounting system Pohoda. We all work together in a great symbiosis and one part without the other could not exist.

So it was only fitting that we had to celebrate such a big step together over dinner and good drinks.

With this, we celebrated the new stage of the KULTURISTIKA.COM web portal and made a big full stop for the enormous work and in the end the exhaustion we all put into it and now we are already creating a new story with a calm pulse rate.