Over the last several months we've heard you loud and clear regarding site performance.  While we've been heavily focused on developing new features that we hope you'll love, we also recognize the need to continue to improve and enhance the most import feature of your communities: performance.  Our latest release was this past Saturday morning and our team heavily focused on large improvements to both general spread and page load times within your communities. 

Initial tests in our QA environment have been extremely encouraging.  We've seen increases in page load times from 39% up to 80+ % for several highly trafficked system pages.  Obviously, if this holds true in our production environments it would be quite a noticeable improvement.  We will be working over the next several weeks on quantifying the improvement in our production environment.  But, for now we figured it might be worthwhile to ask you directly: are you seeing an improvement?  If our QA data mirrors reality even somewhat, you should see a very noticeable boost in speed.

So, what exactly did we do?  This change boils down to a comprehensive overhaul in the way many pages and modules retrieve their data.  By taking increased advantage of server caching, we have eliminated several unnecessary calls to our database that may result in delayed response times.  In the simplest terms, when a new page is loaded there are tons of small pieces of information that need to be retrieved - requiring a trip to the database and back to render that piece of data.  With our recent changes, we're taking more advantage of cache to "store" pertinent pieces of information for re-use.  These pieces of data become immediately available the next time a user hits a page that might require that data.  As more and more users navigate the site, more data will be stored in cache.  So, performance will actually increase during peak usage.  Logically, this may seem a bit backwards, but it does make sense.  More activity = more information requested from database = more information stored in cache = more information immediately available for the next user.  Now, using cache to optimize performance is not a new concept.  We've used cache in our system for quite some time.  Consider this most recent release an example of "cache optimization" - we're getting smarter about how we use cache to improve performance.  We will continue to build on this improvement in upcoming releases as well.

System-wide, our peak usage hours fall in weekday afternoons (EST).  However, its important to note that the above improvements will be noticed most readily when your specific site is most active.  Our team is very excited about these updates and we hope you and your members are seeing huge speed boosts!  Don't hesitate to leave a comment with your observations or questions about the change.