We made several improvements over the past week aimed at speeding up page load times, particularly in the admin tools. We are seeing at least a 20% increase in speed overall and 30% or more for the admin tools.
These changes included:
- Removed relevancy checks from some admin navigation items. You may see some items to which you don't have access or which are not relevant to your current site. For instance, you may see a link to the dissertation defenses even though you do not edit a site which has defenses. This improved all admin page load times.
- Optimized blocklist code. This code checks the visitor's IP address against a list IPs we have blocked from accessing our sites. This improved a process which executes on all pages, whether public or admin.
- Improved code for key queries that check a user's permissions. This improved page load times in the admin tools.
- Removed display of activity log that showed recent user administrative actions on sites the current user can edit. We will restore this in the future as a better-optimized and dynamically updating feature. This improved load times on all admin pages.
- Deleted activity log entries that were over a year old, eliminating approximately 100,000 records.
- Deleted unused database indexes.
- Added new indexes to aid slow database calls.
We will continue to work to improve performance times through the system.