January was a pretty great month for Kernl. We got a lot of bug fixes, some performance improvements, and even a new beta feature out the door. Let’s dive in!
WordPress Site Health Beta
This month we released a beta of our WordPress Site Health service. The goal of this service is to help you determine where performance problems are and why they are happening. The dashboard below gives you a high level view of how performance looks on each of your sites.
Once you click in to any site you see data for the last 7 days.
The data here helps you diagnose performance issues. Using the plugin changes panel you can tie performance issues back to adding/removing/updating of plugins. Google Lighthouse scores show trends on you site’s performance, usability, SEO and more over time.
If you’d like the join the beta, send an email to jack@kernl.us.
Bugs & Performance
- Improved performance of plugin/theme list pages – The API calls to /api/v1/plugins and /api/v1/themes were incredibly inefficient. They hadn’t really been touched since Kernl’s inception and needed some love. After doing some query optimization and stripping out unnecessary data, the payload and response time were reduced by a factor of 10. The worst case example was response size going from ~750KB to ~75KB and response time from ~4000ms to ~250ms.
- Server resource increases – Kernl’s main Node.js application servers have been running with 1 vCPU and 1GB of RAM for about the last 2 years. Lately we’ve seen some resource exhaustion and decided it was time to upgrade. The new app servers now run with 2 vCPUs and 2GB of RAM.
- Server disk space / inode exhaustion – The process of building plugins and themes can use up a lot of space and file system resources. We weren’t doing a great job of cleaning those resources up periodically which could cause some performance issue. We now clean up all temporary files once a day which should prevent this from happening anymore.
- Easy Digital Download License Validation Error – There was a bug in EDD license validation where the source system wouldn’t send back valid JSON. This would break license validation instead of handling the error gracefully.
- Profile page autocomplete – If you had form auto-completion on it would sometimes cause the profile page to reset your password. We’ve disabled autocomplete on this form to resolve the issue.
- Theme tiles not showing correct build status – During the course of our performance improvement work we noticed that theme tiles were not showing the correct build status. This has now been resolved.