Under Pressure
April 9th, 2009 by daryIt has been a crazy two weeks of none stop work with everything coming together just in time for the Easter break. Well almost. Over the last week the timetotrade website performance had almost ground to a halt due to the continued growth in users. Historically the number of timetotrade unique users has been growing at approximately 10% per month. But over the last 6+ months this has accelerated dramatically, with unique users for example over the last 30 days up 23%; the best part is that these large double digit growth figures are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
This is great and thank you very much for your support, however the increased rate of growth is putting our IT infrastructure under a lot of pressure. To address the performance issue, over the last week we have been re-writing sections of The River and Accounting features to optimise database queries, improve I/O performance and memory utilisation. The new optimise Accounting & Taxation code is now live with a number of bug fixes included. In addition the new Tax forms required for submitting Investment Club and Private Investor tax returns for the year ending 5th of April 2009 are now available. The initial enhancements of The River code has been deployed today (Thursday 9th of April 2009) with the main fixes due to go live after the Easter break; hopefully for now the responsiveness of the website will be acceptable while we finalise testing the next phase of enhancements to The River.
On a second front we are in the process of designing a new IT hardware infrastructure solution with higher performance servers distributed across two datacentres. The new IT infrastructure will offer a significantly improved browsing experience with much improved service availability. If everything goes according to plan the new solution will be built, tested and ready for use in May; until then we will work hard to optimise the performance of the existing solution.
You might ask why we are pushing out products so quickly; the bottom line is that we are aiming to have a range of core products deployed and stabilised by the end of the summer before we start executing the next phase of our business strategy. Before we execute the next phase, the website and related products and services on offer must be stable. The only way to know if they will be stable is to stress test them in a live environment over an extended period. What is our strategy? What products will we be rolling out? Well you will just have to wait and see, but I can assure you it will be worth the wait - well I hope so. On that note I hope you have a great Easter break; I looking forward to catching up on some sleep..