Super Speeds and Better Job Processing

01/31/2015 Posted by Brandon

In the past year we’ve more than tripled the number of Knack customers! This is obviously fantastic but there was a downside: our infrastructure was starting to feel the strain of this increased traffic and activity.

The past few months we’ve focused on improving this infrastructure and some of the job processing that requires intensive resources.

We launched these upgrades last week and we’ve been thrilled with the results! We’re seeing increased speeds across the board and improved job processing.

We’ve detailed these updates below.

Infrastructure

We’ve completely upgraded every aspect of our cloud-based infrastructure:

  • Speed – we’ve beefed up our servers, streamlined code, and optimized our databases to speed up how quickly your apps and records load.
  • Capacity – we’ve doubled our capacity by utilizing multiple cores on each cloud server. We’ve re-wired our job processing so we can now add unlimited capacity with a click of a button.
  • Compression – we’re now compressing all data delivery through our API before delivering it. For some pages and views this means up to an 80% smaller data payload.

Job Processing

An online database needs to be able to run big jobs to insert, update, or delete many records at once. In the past we’ve handled these without communicating much about how the job was going or how fast it was processing.

Along with increased speeds from the infrastructure improvements above, we’ve added some nice features for processing imports, batch updates, and batch deletes:

  • Real-time Progress: you can now see how fast your job is processing and how much is left to run.
  • Cancel Jobs: you can cancel your job at anytime. Any records processed before the cancel will be saved.
  • Delay Alerts: if our job queue is too busy we’ll let you know if there’s a delay.

What’s next?

Although most of these improvements are behind the scenes these changes set us up to grow well into the future.

It also allows us to get back to focusing on on adding great features and improvements.

Recent Entries