How an adtech company enhanced its performance infrastructure

About the company

Criteo is a global technology company that helps marketers and media owners reach their goals through the world’s leading Commerce Media Platform.

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Criteo’s mission is to bring richer experiences to every consumer by powering the world’s marketers and media owners with trusted and impactful advertising.

Statistics

Industry

Software

Location

France

Revenue

2.01 billion EUR (2022)

Employees

3,500+ (2023)

Key metrics

5B+ ads/day, with 18k+ customers. Total 4B+ Product SKUs and over 3,500 product categories

Gatling Enterprise users

50+

10+

new projects for performance load testing

Challenges

With Criteo’s growth in the international market, the company needed to replicate its global traffic load.
Criteo also needed to know that its hosting infrastructure could handle increased traffic and how it would affect its performance.

Solution

Criteo was convinced by Gatling’s promising results and moved to self-hosted Gatling Enterprise for enhanced parameters of performance load testing in 2019.

With Gatling Enterprise, Criteo began performing regular capacity testing to know its website’s limits and ensure its infrastructure could meet the users' needs. Further, Criteo began to test the response times of restful API calls in its throttling tool with Gatling Enterprise to ensure they could achieve its performance goals. One of the key benefits of using Gatling Enterprise was that it allowed the company to set up a distributed testing environment to accurately replicate global traffic.

Results

Currently, Gatling Enterprise is being used by 5 performance engineers assisting teams with 70+ employees in Criteo.

One of Criteo’s internal projects was a throttling tool designed to protect their applications from sudden bursts of traffic. Gatling Enterprise was used to create simulated traffic to test this information.

With more than 35K+ servers worldwide, 250B HTTP requests, 130 Gbps, and 4B unique banner requests per day, the response to the bids is 80ms or less, 24/7.
Criteo can handle 4M+ HTTP requests/second during peak season. It takes less than 10ms to select optimal campaigns and build a product from a catalog of 100M+ products.

Criteo has increased the use of Gatling Enterprise for load testing, moving from 1 to 10+ projects with a high focus on performance testing.

"Our job has been to ensure a high level of performance from Criteo’s tech stack and that’s why we chose Gatling. It’s been a real pleasure to work with Gatling and they have been very responsive for everything we’ve needed."

Sullivan Veres, Senior SDE Lead R&D

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