What’s New With Kernl – July & August 2019

I hope everyone has had a great summer (or winter if you are in the southern hemisphere)! Over the past 2 months we’ve gotten a lot great stuff done, so let’s dive in.

Features & Infrastructure

  • Kernl has upgraded from Mongo 3.x to Mongo 4.2 with WiredTiger. We get improved performance and the latest features with this change.
  • Our Redis instance has moved to DigitalOcean along with the rest of our infrastructure. Prior to this we were using managed host that lived outside the NYC3 data center. Response times decreased ~50ms or so with this change.
  • The high traffic plugin and theme update check endpoints had a round of performance tuning done. Resource consumption was lowered in meaningful way.
  • ???Kernl Analytics Active Plugins???- Kernl Analytics will now track what plugins are most active across your install-base. You only need to be signed up for Kernl Analytics and use the latest plugin_update_check.php file to get this new feature.
  • Our MongoDB database has been moved to DigitalOcean NYC3. Prior to this we were hosting on Compose.io outside of the datacenter. Originally this decision was made because managing databases is tough, but the quality of hosting at Compose has gone done significantly in the past year. With this change we shaved ~150ms off of response times.
  • Some tweaks were made to our network firewalls to make them easier to manage. Thanks DigitalOcean!
???Kernl Analytics Active Plugins ???

Bug Fixes

  • Load testing machines would fail to provision if the API call to DigitalOcean failed. This has been resolved.
  • The load testing master node would fail to start sometimes if secondary nodes failed to connect. The threshold for starting tests has been lowered so that this won’t happen anymore.
  • If a credit card expires and the invoice payment fails, the account isn’t marked as paid when a new card is added and a successful payment happens.
  • When switching between themes/plugins in Kernl Analytics the domain data wasn’t reloading with the new plugin/theme.
  • Thanks to a customer bug report and code snippet, the plugin_update_check.php no longer sends headers before the license check fails.

Blog Posts

That’s it for July and August!