launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I meant to send this yesterday.. oops

The hard time is now 11 seconds, and we saw 800 timeouts (about 0.02%
of requests)

There are about 20 page ids we need to improve before we can drop to
10 seconds : there are another 1000 page renders falling between 10
and 11 seconds at the moment. That means we could be dropping the
timeout to 10 seconds as early as the start of April... as usual I'll
be reevaluating as we go.

This is pretty exciting to me: we've come an incredibly long way since
we started systematically measuring and focusing on render times [as
the first plank in becoming fast overall] : thats a 9 second drop in 9
months. I credit our achievement to the following things:
 - you guys
 - some small coding rule changes (like permitting cached property on
model objects, and query count tests)
 - the restructure allowing folk the time to dig into a timeout
problem over several days without being pressured by feature work (and
vice verca, allowing features to be made fast without interrupts for
day-to-day issues)
 - a willingness from our user base for us to make engineering
tradeoffs (such as moving the safety net of the hard timeout every
time we've got room to improve without causing a mass increase in the
timeouts, removing features that are underperforming or of little
benefit but high cst)

I've been casually polling folk as we've gone through the process so
far, and in the last couple of weeks a very interesting change has
occured: rather than hearing 'gee LP is slow, its great you are
improving it, I've notice some improvements already', I'm now hearing
'you know, I haven't been pissed off by LP being slow recently.' That
might come across as faint praise, but its really significant:
 *** We've moved out of the zomg slow bucket and into the
just-another-website bucket ***

Now, we have 2 more seconds to drop our hard timeout by, to reach
Francis' challenge of 9 seconds for the next epic : I'm sure we'll
manage that without any difficulty.

-woo-

-Rob