Recent Improvements to Server Performance

Posted by C. G. Brown Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have noticed and as we mentioned before, we have had more issues than we would have liked in the process of tuning our service to meet the growing demand. We're excited to announce a few improvements we've made that should already be noticeable to you in the form of faster page loads and a better experience overall.

• New Database Server - We've relocated our applications and database to a separate server from the other ProjectLocker services. You have probably already noticed improvements in the speed of Portal and any operations overall that require database access. We've also upgraded to a more recent version of MySQL, which should give us performance benefits as well.
• New Application Platform - Our Ruby on Rails applications, including Portal and our internal server communication APIs, are now running on nginx with Phusion Passenger. We made the decision to switch from Apache for those apps so that we could take advantage of nginx's relatively smaller configuration footprint and lean memory usage, which should free up resources for other applications.
• Trac Media Caching - Each customer's Trac needs to run in its own environment, but there are some base static resources that are shared, such as JavaScript and CSS files for Trac layouts. We copied the relevant shared files to a single location and instructed Trac to look there for standard media. This means that you get a cache benefit from your browser across all Trac projects in your account, since the static media will be coming from the same place.
• mod_expires - We added mod_expires configuration settings to our Trac configurations so that static assets will be cached and not served over and over again. Combined with the media caching, we've seen page load time improvements of up to 75% across all servers for Trac.
• mod_wsgi Tuning - We reconfigured mod_wsgi to only run as a daemon process. This means that it's decoupled from our Apache server's memory requirements and threading, and our Apache processes use less memory as a result, again leading to more speed and performance.

At ProjectLocker, we're proud that over 100,000 users have chosen us to meet their software quality needs, and we're excited to make the changes that will once again provide the quality and stability you've come to expect from us. We're not stopping here: soon to come are upgrades to Trac, Subversion, and a new, more usable experience for ProjectLocker Portal, as well as other unique features that will provide industry-leading security and management capabilities.

If you have any questions, concerns, or feature requests, please just open a New Support Request in ProjectLocker Portal and our team will promptly respond.