Simplify. Get an order of magnitude speedup.

Andre Lewis on October 01, 2009

Have you noticed Scout feels snappier lately? We made some major simplifications that sped things up a lot. Here’s the CPU load on one of our DB servers:

(and yes, we use Scout to monitor itself!)

Even better, the response time for users improved dramatically.

Scout’s longest actions before and after the speedup:

The simplification

What yielded such a dramatic speedup? Earlier this year, we implemented a very generic datastore and reporting system. It could handle all sorts of data, relationships within the data, etc.

Unfortunately, we never got to demonstrate all the benefits of this cool system. It wasn’t viable from either a maintenance or a performance standpoint.

So we rolled it back. And we got back a ton of performance, as you can see.