Over the past couple months, we’ve been working deep within the heart of Skritter’s client-server communications engine, trying to speed things up and improve reliability. While we haven’t yet solved every problem with occasional slowdowns, overall performance is up! Skritter is saving reviews, grabbing new characters, and loading certain pages faster than ever before.
Note that I’m not talking about the Flash client’s animation or recognition speed, but rather its networking speed. These changes should have reduced the number of green loading ellipses you see, and the amount of time you have to spend waiting for Skritter to catch up and give you more prompts. I’ve already done a couple rounds of optimization on the CPU performance of the Flash client, so it’s harder to improve performance there.
Skritter is hosted on Google App Engine, which because of its hungry growth, sometimes experiences serving slowdowns. Skritter had been getting hit hard by these in January and part of February, but with these changes, we should have decreased the impact that such slowdowns will have. We’ll still get hit, but it usually won’t be as bad. Then again, App Engine performance has been great lately; perhaps Google’s server capacity won’t fall behind demand again.
We’ll continue to optimize. More speed is always better, right? Right! We’re working on adding site speed metrics to a server status page, so that if things are going slow, you can tell whether it’s the Skritter servers or your connection. Scott will sire another blog post when that’s ready.