Hi Bubblers –
I want to give you a heads up on some behind-the-scenes changes we are working on.
One thing I know a lot of people care about is how fast bubble-built websites are. There are two components to “fast”: average speed, and volatility (how much speed varies depending on time of day / traffic). We’re taking some steps to reduce volatility on the shared cluster by doing a better job of isolating users’ apps from each other, so that a burst of traffic on one app has less chance of affecting another app.
Currently, system resources are shared on something like a first-come-first-serve model; we’re changing it to give a fixed allotment of resources to each app. We expect this to lead to much more consistent performance; although your app might slow down if you get a ton of your own users, your app should be less likely to slow down if someone else’s app gets a ton of users.
The downside of this is that the best-case performance (ie, if we’re having a very light-traffic day) might go down a bit, but we think it’s better to get consistent speeds, rather than having it be very slow some of the time and fast other times. We will of course continue to work on boosting the average speed across all situations.
These changes are most likely to be noticeable across data-intensive operations (searches that return a lot of results, and workflows that touch a lot of data), since that’s the most sensitive to overall system resource levels. We expect that average page load speeds (for pages that don’t load a ton of data on page load) will improve slightly as the result of the changes, since they will be less likely to be delayed by long data operations.
Another advantage of this change is that it opens up the possibility of letting users pay for more capacity to run their apps without having to switch to dedicated. We’ve gotten the feedback that a lot of people would like to pay a bit more for faster, more reliable performance, but that the pricing jump between shared plans and dedicated plans is too steep. We’d like to be able to offer an intermediate option, and are looking into whether it would be possible to use this new algorithm to offer this.
(None of the above affects users who are currently on dedicated plans – your apps will still share 100% of your dedicated clusters’ capacity).
Anyway, wanted to keep you posted on what we’re thinking and doing here. We’re likely to roll out this new code as a series of incremental changes starting later this week, and then look into potential pricing options for more capacity once it is live and we have some data on how it is performing in the wild.
Would people on the Team plan still need to pay more if you decide to allow a purchasable performance increase?
