Stabilizing legacy PHP under load

Problem: Stop peak failures on legacy without rewriting the whole project.
Solution: Load audit, SQL optimization, public-contour cache, surgical patches.
Stack: PHP, MySQL
Result: Stable responses at peak; business kept running on the current codebase.

Production ran on legacy PHP: fine on quiet days, timeouts and complaints during sales. A full rewrite did not fit time or budget.

Inspected slow queries, N+1, missing cache on public lists, fragile SQL. Fixed by impact: indexes, batching, fragment cache, safer queries. Release without taking the storefront down.

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