Goplan performance notes

Fred Oliveira on August 14, 2007, Comments (10)

At least a few of our users have been noticing a few performance issues when using Goplan - they may not affect everyone because of the way the application is clustered across our servers, but the bottom line is that some people have been affected with requests that take longer than usual, and even a few halts with a “Proxy Error”, which means that the server inside the cluster took longer than what’s acceptable to reply.

So here’s a status report and what we’re doing to solve this issue and make sure performance gets back to normality.

Current status

We’re actively looking at this problem, and things appear to be fixed. While I know it isn’t comfortable to read the words “appear to be” (instead of a better “things are fixed”), I also think that running circles around the issue isn’t helpful. Performance is back to normal, and we’ll monitoring the servers non-stop until we’re sure the dreaded “Proxy Error” won’t come back.

But why has it been slow? The increased recent load on the servers is a consequence of both the peak in traffic we’ve been experiencing and our new instant data backup and replication system - I don’t want to throw down any tech lingo on you guys, but it’s pretty cool and the bottom line is, it’s securing your data. We’re adding new machines to the cluster to bring the load back to normal and accommodate everyone better.

So, to recap: Things appear to be normal now, and we’re both making sure the problem did go away for good and that we add enough new machines to keep performance levels high. As always, we’re available on our support email should you need to voice any concerns - we are listening.

Comments:

That’s good to know everything is getting back to normal.
Any clue when you guys start rolling out new features?

Does “back to normal” mean “still unusably slow”?

Tom: No it doesn’t, although if you are experiencing problems at this time it is definitely not on our end. Here’s a graph (updated only a couple of minutes ago) that shows one of the machines in the cluster - note how different things are since we took measures about performance this morning. Things are actually way faster than they were yesterday, or a week ago for that matter.

Can you give me more details on what exactly you are experiencing? Feel free to send us an email to the support account with details from your registered account email address - because the one you’re commenting with doesn’t appear to be a Goplan user. I’m trying to figure out if and which machine in the cluster may be responding slow to your requests but from my tests (and we have a lot of people using the service as I write this) it’s all looking very good.

How are things going on Amazon for you guys these days?

My company is considering rolling out some new apps on EC2. I’d love to hear how you guys are finding it and whether you remain pleased.

Hi Fred, I’m no longer a registered user I’m afraid: I canceled my subscription a month or two ago because the service was too slow to be usable. Far too many page refreshes, each one taking 4-6 seconds! Way too slow for a tool which needs to be used constantly.

I was (somewhat snarkily) asking if the service speed had improved - I’ll check back in a few months because I really like your feature set but hate the speed at which it runs. I’m sticking to basecamp for the time being - it really is *much* faster than goplan.

Thanks for your comments, though, and good luck with the service improvements

Tom: ah, well, I think you’ll be happy to test it out with the new speed at which its running now - give the demo account a run ([email protected] / demodemo) and let me know if things get better.

Jim: We have mixed feelings. It’s pretty stable and considering our backup and replication solutions it’s very scalable. But it’s also got a bit of a higher latency than you’d usually find in dedicated solutions elsewhere. We’re (quite seriously) considering a move, although we love EC2. Often it’s a matter of milliseconds in response times, but they make a difference.

Fred, thanks for the reply. Pleased to hear that your speeds are improved: I’ll ask one of the techies to give the site another test soon.

Thanks for the follow up Fred.

At my current stage of investigation on EC2, I”m still just trying to figure out how to handle persistent storage and create some kind of stable IP solution.

Anyhow, your feedback was helpful to me. Thanks!

I just want the template or style switcher!!! man …. When are you going to update this?!

[...] our performance issues and complaints from several Goplan users, we’ve decided to move Goplan away from EC2 into [...]

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