Jan 14, 2016 Posted by BoxCycle on Jan 14, 2016 in Site Updates | 0 comments

Faster Servers, Ruby 2.2.3, and More

Over the past 6 weeks or so we’ve made a number of changes to make BoxCycle run faster. The end result is that access time, at least for basic pages measured by our regular ping tests, was cut nearly in half. The site now feels much faster and should be much better able to handle traffic spikes.

The most significant change has been to upgrade to newer, much faster servers running newer, more performant versions of our software stack. The second most significant source of improvement was upgrading from Ruby 2.0, which we’ve being using for the past year, to the much faster Ruby 2.2.3.

Along with these upgrades, we’ve made a number of other optimizations. Some examples are reduction in the use of third party scripts on the client side and improved server-side performance of our supporting sites, such our Live Chat service, which can slow down regular page loads. Another example is better handling of non-desirable traffic, such as performance sucking brute force hacking bots designed to probe for PHP vulnerabilities. Since we know we don’t serve PHP, we can simply disregard these requests without bothering our app server.

We hope you enjoy the new faster experience. If you experience any problems please let us know.