I hope everyone had a great February! We didn’t too much feature development this month, but there was a lot of bug fixing and performance improvements, so let’s dive in!
Feature, Bugs, and Performance
- Node.js – Kernl is now on Node.js 12.16.1. This release was all about security fixes.
- Load Testing Machine Provisioning – We weren’t calculating the correct number of machines to provision on DigitalOcean. This lead to some serious over-provisioning when running load tests. This has been resolved, which means more customers can run more load tests at the same time.
- Load Testing Secondary Node Behavior – Kernl uses Locust under the covers to run our WordPress Load Testing service. The Locust primary node has an argument called “–expect-slaves”. It tells Locust “Don’t start the load test until at this this many secondary nodes have connected.”. We weren’t calculating this number correctly which led to some weird behavior. This is now resolved so load tests should start in every situation now.
- Easy Digital Downloads Domains – Kernl wasn’t passing the domain along to EDD. We now do this, which allows you to restrict updates to specific domains while using EDD.
- Load Testing Snapshots – Kernl used to build up each load testing machine from the ground up every time a load test was started. We now start from a snapshot that gets us 50% of the way there. This has improved load test start times (especially on large tests) by an average of 30%.
- GitHub Authorization Changes – The GitHub API is changing how it handles authorization headers. We’ve update Kernl to handle this change, so we’ll be good going forward when GitHub deprecates the old method.
- High Traffic Endpoint Audit – We did an audit of our high-traffic API endpoints and cleaned some things up. Slight performance improvements were had (1%-2%), but mostly the improvements have been in code readability and comprehension.
- GitLab Deployment Issues – In a recent release of GitLab they changed the required fields when asking for an access token via a refresh token. This broke all GitLab deployments for Kernl for a few days while we tracked down the issue. This has since been resolved.
- Load Testing Unit & Integration Tests – When our load testing service was launched we weren’t sure if it was going to be successful. We’ve proven that it is a worthwhile feature, so now we’re focusing on reliability. We’re in the process of adding a suite of unit and integration tests around this functionality.
That’s it for this month! See you in March.