More speed

We are always looking for ways to improve our rostering and patient survey software offerings. Whether it be enhancements requested by existing customers, or features required by potential customers before we can win their business, we spend a fair bit of time reviewing these things and implementing what we can.One thing we always focus on is speed and performance. Although many of our day-to-day functions are not time critical (compared to, say, online gaming) the speed of our functions can really affect the perception of the quality of our software.So we have have dived under the bonnet over the last few months to look at things in our code that are no longer necessary, or transmit more data than they need to, or do things in ways that are not as efficient as modern software design would allow.The speed improvement has been sometimes hundreds of milliseconds per function. Which may not sound like a lot, but could be 40-50% of the time spent refreshing a page.In areas where performance is time critical, such as to manage the onslaught of users in self-rostering, we have dived even deeper. This has resulted in us changing our entire approach to what is done where in our code. Our testing indicates that some of these processes are 300 (yes ... three hundred!) times faster than the old ones. Something even we did not believe at first.You will see the impact of some of these things in the performance chart here: on average our performance gets more than 30% faster from about 20 February when we rolled out some recent changes.