Just beat it.

[[ Faster ]]

Our previous posts touched on how we work harder, and better our service.

This entry is third in a 5-part series reflecting on our past year.

In this post, we’d also like to let you know how we’ve tried to make our service faster, for your benefit. We don’t sit idle when it comes to our site’s performance. Nope, we constantly instrument, measure, analyse and improve. And all this, completely for free! We haven’t charged a single cent from any of you, and will continue to keep all these basics free.

Reduced SMS gateway lag.

We started to hit a bottleneck in our SMS processing pipeline resulting in a period of huge delays as SMSes got clogged up (yep it caused that one incident we’re really sorry about). But we’ve fixed that and made our SMS processing 3x faster, reducing lag to just several seconds. As you can see, we treat SMS lag very seriously, and even track each of your telco’s lag separately. You can see both the number of SMSes we receive from each telco and their corresponding lag time in log seconds. (Haha, yes, you can see we were very original in choosing colours for each telco! :P)

The amount of lag we’ve reduced:

Faster website.

We’ve done a whole bunch of database and server upgrades in order to get our site way faster and stabler than before. If you don’t believe us, check out these 3rd-party response time graphs courtesy of Pingdom! We’ve still got a way to go, and have yet to unleash our secret weapon which will make us at least another 3x faster. We’ll do that we start allowing access to archived beats and when we need more juice!

How much faster we’ve made the site:

Faster Twitter imports.

Twitter imports used to take days as our number of users exploded and you wouldn’t receive any SMSes until a long while later, when it was probably useless. Now, we’ve sped up our Twitter importers such that your imported tweets take on average 20-30 minutes for the our most active users. Rockstars? You get them in mere minutes, often under three.

Receive incoming tweets in near real-time, faster than before:

Existing members, if you’re not already at the Silver perks level, or one of our Rockstars, you should upgrade yourself now!

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team