Deploying today: Enhanced cache layer

[Charles]

We are deploying updates to our backend cache layer today. This change should see decreased latency for logged in members. While a small change, multiplied over every click for every member it will make a noticeable difference.

This change does not impact guests/bots (those not logged in) as those views are handled by the CDN.

You may see up to 10 minutes of slowness at some point today while the change deploys.

[Randy Calvert]

Out of curiosity, what are you actually using for that caching layer?

Anything that decreases latency, especially for logged in members is welcome and appreciated!  Those are the sorts of improvements that being long term value in CiC!

[Charles]

We use a combo of Redis, DynamoDB, and also pre-processing results that are stored at the system level. So like some statistic reports not available on Classic are calculated at the cloud level and then stored for the community use. This is particularly true for intensive calculations that would time out if you try to do it live.

There's also a lot of delayed requests that go into queue when processing a request or data in real time is not needed.

[Randy Calvert]

I saw the slowdown earlier on my site.  (In fact, I had a moderator ping me asking if I was busy breaking anything.)

It looks to be back now and the site certainly does feel snappier.  I don't have anything I can use to show imperial data to show logged in user data (I have before/after from WebPageTest.org, but I don't have it logged in).  But as I'm navigating around...  it feels more responsive!