We’ve come a long way from License Statistics version 3.0 to version 3.5 in speed and performance improvements. During the last two weeks, we’ve continued to implement significant improvements to License Statistics v3.5.1 that answer the needs of our customers. Our efforts have been focused on:
1. Decreasing CPU usage
2. Minimizing GUI response time
Decreased CPU usage by over 75%
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The improvements
Improvements on the database side delivered in v3.5.1 dramatically decrease CPU usage by more than 75% when gathering statistics. This result was achieved on our load-testing setup, which contains historical data gathered from 30 license servers over a period of 10 months – that’s about 600 million records in a single table in the database!
The test
Using a mock setup to observe CPU usage, we monitored the activity of 20,000 users on 5 license servers, each containing 200 features, with a 5-minute update interval. This large-scale setup was to ensure that License Statistics will operate smoothly, efficiently, and continuously for even our biggest and most demanding customers.
During testing, License Statistics ran on a single machine with a 4-core CPU and 4GB of RAM. As visible from the screenshots, the system didn’t have the resources to run v3.5. On the other hand, everything worked perfectly well with v3.5.1, as CPU usage went up for about 70 seconds and then remained low for the rest of the 5-minute update interval.
The result
Our customers can now monitor an extremely large number of users while maintaining a low update interval and still have spare CPU power for other tasks.
Minimizing GUI response time to less than 2 seconds
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We’ve also succeeded in increasing response time for the GUI. By merging CSS and JS files, we decreased the number of requests needed to render the pages. Furthermore, we applied proper caching of the data on the client side, thus lowering traffic over the network. And finally, we applied memory-caching on the server side to make it respond much faster. With all these optimizations in place, the server response time has gone down to less than 2 seconds for all the pages!
These have been just a few of the many improvements that are to come in the next releases of License Statistics. As we always strive to deliver top quality solutions, we can assure you that we’re not stopping until we know that YOU have the best tools for the job.
We further welcome you to participate in our customer-driven development through our issue tracking system, where we cooperate with our customers to help solve real business problems.
