Performance Improvements

Hi SG, as you might have noticed, we started running into slow load times last week during peak hours. We moved to a new host recently (AWS), and I setup our database on an instance with 122 GiB of RAM. This allowed our dataset and indexes to fit in memory, which solved a number of issues we experienced in the past couple of months as our database grew in size. Nonetheless, we've been hitting some limitations on the CPU side of things the past week, as seen here. The graph shows four days of CPU load on our database instance, and the waves represent the rise and fall of traffic during peak and off-peak hours. Once the instance reaches 100% load, we obviously see a sudden drop in performance as tasks begin to queue up.

I spent most of the past week better analyzing our traffic, and rolling out a wide variety of improvements. The one change you'll likely notice and dislike is the homepage no longer showing the total number of results. However, this is a needed change and one that's going to help us keep the load on the instance down. Other changes include adjustments to how the homepage results and featured giveaway are selected, and how winners and giveaway feedback are stored and retrieved. At the end of the day, you should notice the site being more responsive. The archive page will load twice as fast, the homepage will load 40% faster, user profiles, messages, and trades searches 30% faster, and individual discussions will load 15% faster. Other pages received some improvements as well, but the above are the ones you'll likely benefit from the most.

Overall, the performance is better than expected, and you can see the results here. As mentioned earlier, the blue line represents CPU load on the database during four days last week, and for comparison, the green line represents CPU load yesterday.