28 December 2020

Server speed improvements 🔗

Even when we are not releasing new features, we spend lots of time caring for our database and servers. After all, with 30 000 monthly active users and almost 700 000 monthly asset downloads, there is some serious traffic going on.

Petr Dlouhý , the mastermind behind our server-side code, managed to incredibly improve the performance of the server over the recent months.

Here is a list of improvements:

Search speed

Search requests speed is 3x faster. Of course the time it takes for your search results to show up also depends on the time it takes for the thumbnails to get downloaded. Yet this change should be very noticeable in the add-on as well. If you like statistics, check this out:

Snímek obrazovky pořízený 2020-12-10 10-54-30 (1).png

Front-end gallery speedups

Front-end gallery reads 2x faster. It now uses WebP images which are 10x smaller for images with transparency. Further, the caching of the pages was improved. These three changes combined should shorten the time it takes for web results to be read as manyfold. Additionally, every performance spared on the front-end can improve the performance in the add-on, since the load on the servers is shared for both add-on and our web. It’s our secret wish for Blender to support WebP images, as this will allow us to deliver search results in the add-on even faster. Again, here is a nice picture of the server load before and after the improvement:

Snímek obrazovky pořízený 2020-12-10 10-55-07 (1).png

new_features

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