New Database Machines Improving Site Performance

Every week we do hundreds of behind-the-scenes things to make StockCharts.com better.  Most of the time, these things are relatively unnoticed by users - which is a good thing - except that the website continues to perform reliably and accurately.

Occasionally we make one of these changes that can be seen.  Check out this graph:

This graph shows the response times of the database servers that contains information about our members and their accounts.  As you can see, the responses times for this test were getting slower and slower over time.  (The test was a kind of "worst case" test so users didn't actually experience such a dramatic slow down.)

A little over a week ago, we replaced the hardware for this database with two of the the latest and greatest machines from Dell.  You can see on the graph that it has made a dramatic difference.  Our new database hardware should be able to take us well into the future without seeing these kind of performance issues anytime soon.