After being outshouted and bashed by plenty of users in the news, one of the leading crypto exchanges Coinbase lays out a new tech plan which will work to prevent outages on its platform in the future.
The traffic spike which caused severe disruption of its exchange service was in the Coinbase news earlier this month as it angered many users. The exchange later said that it is working on technical changes which aim to provide more stability in the future.
A blog post published late on Friday shows that Coinbase lays out a new plan in which it implements “a number of improvements” that would allow the exchange’s servers to handle a sudden surge in its usage – as experienced last Monday.
“Around 16:05 PDT [23:05 UTC], the price of BTC reached USD $10,000. In connection with the rising price, we experienced a 5x traffic spike over 4 minutes. Our autoscaling was unable to keep pace with this dramatic increase in traffic,” reads the blog.
The traffic spike led to increased latency as Coinbase noted. This had a domino effect on other services, too. With the servers becoming saturated and the users trying to access and use the platform, error reports also spiked by around 50% as visitors experienced plenty of timeouts and other server errors.
After a thorough review of the issues in the crypto news, Coinbase lays out a tech plan to solve them. However, the company was forced to list some of the changes that are currently being implemented to prevent similar traffic-spike outages from happening again.
Meanwhile, the exchange also noted that it is working on adjusting its systems to lower the impact of traffic spikes through “pre-scaling” – which is basically creating more server instances under heavy load. The exchange will also rely more on caching, which has users load a stored version of pages in the browser rather than reloading full pages every time the website is visited.
“I personally think that autoscaling is great for the e-commerce industry” noted Paolo Ardoino, who is the chief technical officer (CTO) at the rival exchange Bitfinex. “Spikes in website traffic at exchanges can take place within milliseconds and place significant demands on an exchange’s capacity to maintain high availability at all times.”
In the long run, Coinbase aims to be the best among many crypto exchanges, but its history with such issues so far can somehow speak for itself.
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