February was a busy month for Kernl that focused on fixing some long-standing bugs, infrastructure upgrades, and a few behavior changes. Let’s dive in!
Bugs, Performance, and Infrastructure
- RoboSwarm & Kernl Load Testing Upgrades – RoboSwarm and Kernl WordPress load testing have been updated to use the latest version of Locust, Python, and Ubuntu when generating load.
- (Bug) Analytics Insertion Error – A very small fraction of Kernl Analytics entries were not inserting into the database correctly. This was due to some drift between the schema and query.
- Markdown builder upgrades – Kernl used a library called
Turndownto convert HTML into Markdown. The library had been renamed a few years ago and it somehow escaped by knowledge. Subsequently we went from version 3 ofTurndownto version 7.x ofto-markdown. This increased performance and patched a slow memory leak. - Analytics batch insert performance– When updates flow through Kernl they are collected in our analytics service. This means that our PostgreSQL server sees anywhere between 50-250 inserts per second as individual queries. Inserts are now batched by 1000 which has reduced load on the database server by ~20%.
- (Bug) License page fails to load in edge case – If you deleted your plugin/theme, but still had a license attached to it then the license page may fail to load. That edge case has been resolved.
- MD5 package – The md5 library available on NPM has been replaced with the built-in crypto library from Node 14.x
- License Management behavior – You can now use multiple license management solutions. If any of them are valid then your update is allowed to proceed.
- RoboSwarm Infrastructure – The RoboSwarm application server has been increased to 2GB of RAM. This server powers https://roboswarm.dev as well as the Kernl Load Testing experience.
That’s it for this month!