Improved Testing & Charting

Today we’re happy to announce we’ve made some big changes to our test servers which mean a range of small but noticeable improvements to both our free customers and our paid users, and to take advantage of this – improved charting.

More Servers

We’ve rolled out an additional 10 servers (spread geographically) in the last week and these servers are already up and running. With these additional servers we now have over 80 running in operation querying sites at a rate of around 25,000 per a minute. This means each server is doing less work now and thus continuing to ensure no delays in testing

Dedicated Test Speeds

Previous to today we’ve always run free and paid tests in batches of around 250, each server testing 250 tests at any point of time, and each contending for the available bandwidth. We’ve now changed this so that each server is only running 20 tests at a time (thanks to the additional servers) and with a dedicated port speed of 250KB. This means you can better detect when performance is peeking and dropping as the charts will better reflect the reality of the load time.

Better charting

Our performance charts always worked quite well but as we’ve started to get more and more data some users started to notice issues and or slow performance. This is because we used to store the data on performance in a MySQL  table (a relic of the first version of StatusCake), it worked well when we had a few hundred tests running but now with over 250 million test results being added each week it was clear we needed to move data over; and that is exactly what we’ve done. Our performance data is now stored on a NoSQL (faster) database format, this means you will notice a lot less issues and a lot more speed! We will also be introducing exporting functionality now that we can query the data in a much faster way.

As always stay tuned for more updates coming your way!