Throughout the day, whilst you’re working away at your Pearl account, our team of engineers are keeping a mothering eye on our servers, traffic, load times and click routes within the system. Our databases run on high spec Dell servers in London, hosted with Rackspace, and are connected to more web servers that deal with your page requests via load balancers and firewalls and then out to the internet.
All this lot is trucking on at a fair old lick, and we need to keep it that way. Last week we had a few reports coming in that Pearl was pretty slow in the mornings, so we had a good look at what was going on. Turns out that our daily backup was taking longer than before and was encroaching on the business day (you guys must be selling lots of stuff and adding lots of notes!). We’ve now shuffled the backup to the dark hours of 0400 GMT so it will be finished well before even the early birds are tapping at keyboards.
We’ve added another layer of caching (where the servers remember results from last time and give you them straight back, rather than having to go and find them again from the database, for example) which has improved average page load speeds by a tidy 10% across the network. We’ve still got a lot more to do, so it will only get faster.
A couple of users also reported that some page loads were excruciatingly slow… after hours of investigation and a few GotoMeeting sessions where we shared screens with users, we identified that the connection between the browser and our servers was being interrupted and hanging on some pages. It’s tricky finding the root of the problem when it’s only happening to < 1% of users. Increasing the HTTP Keep-Alive setting time on the server solved this one (for those of you that are interested).
But working faster is also about how you move around the system. What do you click? What do you want to do with your information most? Are you mostly adding notes to contacts, editing product prices or are you invoicing sales? Our mission statement is to help you run your business better, and we’re always looking for ways to make your working experience smoother.
A while ago we added the ability to add and remove contact Tags without having to change screens – a nice simple “click, choose, save” procedure. This means that you don’t need to drop into the full contact edit screen to perform what would otherwise be a nice quick task. Later this week you’ll also be able to do this with the contact status – watch a video. We’ve recently responded to feedback and added much better navigation around some of the screens using just the keyboard. More of this to come soon.
We have a whole lot more like this waiting in the wings, with the aim of getting you through your day faster. As usual, if you have any ideas – click the “feedback” tab on the left of your screen to go to our Uservoice forums where you can see what other people are suggesting too.
“Quick notes for emails (invoices etc)”
“make importing bank statements more intelligent by auto-suggesting n/c based on previous transaction”
I look forward to hearing from you!
Chris
Subscribe by email
