Category: Kernl News

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!

What’s New With Kernl – June 2019

Hello everyone! Kernl got some pretty interesting updates this month, so let’s dive in!

Features

Average & Median Response Times for Load Tests – Kernl’s WordPress load testing services has always had this data available, we just never surfaced it in a way that was easy to consume. You’ll now see a new tab when you run a load test with information about average and median response times during the course of your test.

Progress Bar for Load Test Initialization – When you create a load test you will now see a progress bar that indicates how far in the process of instantiating your infrastructure we are. Prior to this update it was easy to think that the process had stalled out or broke.

Bug Fixes & Other

  • Load test site ownership verification would fail to certain types of HTML minification. This has been resolve.
  • Our internal analytics services has been refactors to be a singleton. This reduced each app server’s memory footprint by 5MB.
  • The public license validate endpoint now has a 10 second cache on it. This helps us deal with any sort of burst traffic from license validations.
  • Home page Javascript has been minified and concatenated into a single script to decrease load time.
  • All packages have been update on our servers.

Thats it for June! If you have any questions reach out to jack@kernl.us.

What’s New With Kernl – May 2019

There was a lots of work on Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing this month, so lets dive in and learn about it!

Features & Bug Fixes

  • Reliability Load Testing – Have you ever wondered how a WordPress host performs over an extended period of time? Kernl’s new reliability testing allows you to answer that question. You can now run low volume (25 user) load tests for up to 30 hours.
  • Load Test Sharing Page Improvements – You can now see a graph of the total number of failures when you share your load test results. See an example at https://kernl.us/wordpress-load-testing/results/553f746e7a1fa8663be442a9/333.
  • Download Full Load Test Data – You are now able to download all the data from your load test. This is the full, non-sampled, data set that Kernl produces during a load testing run.
  • Sampled Load Test Data – Kernl’s WordPress load testing service can create a lot of data, so for data sets over a certain size we now sample the data. This helps all of charts load faster and improve your experience.

That’s it for this month!

What’s New With Kernl – April 2019

Lots of great stuff came down the pipeline this month at Kernl, so lets dive in!

Features / Bugs / Improvements

  • Share Load Tests – You can now share your load tests publicly! Just click the “share” button that shows up after your load test is completed.
  • Analytics Widget – If you scroll down past the list of plugin/theme versions in the product detail view you’ll now see a widget with analytics data (for Kernl Analytics subscribers).
  • Load Testing Line Graph Performance – For large load testing data sets the line graph performance has been improved by disabling some of the flashier features of Chart.js
  • Analytics page now attempts to show the analytics for the first product in your product list upon entry.
  • NODE_ENV was not set to “production” on our app servers. It is now.
  • The transition to a fully managed load balancer is now complete.

Blog Posts

Thats it for this month!

Introducing Shareable WordPress Load Test Results

For quite awhile now Kernl has had the ability to throw some serious load at your WordPress site, but never a great way to share the results. Today that changes with the introduction of load test result sharing!

🎉

Why would I share my load test results?

The main use case for sharing your load test results is showing your clients that their new WordPress site can handle the traffic load that they expect. For someone like a YouTube or Twitter celebrity this can be a very real problem. Larger organizations also would enjoy this peace of mind.

How do I get started?

Easy! Just click the share button next to the load test that you want to share. You’ll be presented with your sharing URL that can be copy and pasted into Facebook, Twitter, Slack, or Email!

Can I see some examples?

Yes!

As always, feel free to reach out to Jack if you have any questions!

What’s New With Kernl – March 2019

March was a great month for Kernl! We did some blogging, a bunch of infrastructure work, and a little bit of unplanned work due to API deprecation at BitBucket.

Features & Updates

  • Resource Starvation (Load Testing) – We’ve decreased the number of users per machine that Kernl WordPress Load Testing uses. This helps prevent resource starvation on the load generation servers.
  • Pre-Configured Load Tests – Kernl now has 4 different pre-configured load tests to make testing your site’s performance even easier!
  • BitBucket API Update – BitBucket API calls now use Oauth2 and their v2 endpoints. The v1 endpoints are going away in April.
  • Analytics – All of the features available in Kernl Analytics Agency plan have been rolled into one single plan at the same $10/month price point as the small plan. We also increased data retention to 365 days to make our comparison tool more useful.
  • Load Test Working Indicator – Load tests will now show a “working” indicator when in a state before the load test has started but after you have submitted your request to start a load test.
  • MongoDb Driver – The MongoDB driver that we use has been upgraded for better connection retry handling.
  • Updates – Kernl Analytics and Kernl WordPress Load Testing have been upgraded to Node.js 10.15.3 and have had all of their packages updated.
  • License Management Widget – The license management widget was throwing an error when no error was present. This has been resolved.

Blog Posts

Changes to Kernl Analytics

When Kernl analytics was first released we had tiered approach to pricing:

  • A ‘small’ plan with simple daily analytics and 24 hours of data retention.
  • A ‘agency’ plan with data comparison and 90 day data retention.

After looking through our usage data and analytics, we’ve decided that there will now only be a single analytics plan (at the same $10/month price point). It will have the following features:

  • Data comparison between dates. This allows you to see trends with your plugin or theme usage.
  • Data retention of 1 year. Long data retention gives you the ability to see trends that might not be obvious with shorter retention periods.

Thats it! If you have questions reach out to jack@kernl.us

What’s New With Kernl – February 2019

February was a pretty busy month for Kernl! We had a lot of great tweaks to load testing, a few customer feature improvements, and some infrastructure work. Lets get started!

Features & Bugs

  • Multi-Region Load Tests – You can now select multiple regions for your WordPress load tests! Instead of having all traffic come from a single region you can have it evenly distributed across all the available regions. This is useful for testing if you have a global audience.
  • Load Testing Enters General Availability – Kernl’s WordPress load testing is now available for all customers.
  • Delete Load Tests – You are now able to delete your load tests.
  • License Max Version Bug – A customer brought to our attention that the “max_version” field behavior wasn’t quite right. This has been resolved.
  • Customer Card Expiration Cron Job Bug – We recently discovered that the cron job that checks to see if a customer has paid their invoice was broken. This was going on for about 5 months, so some of you may have received you Kernl subscription for free during that time period. 😉
  • Multiple License Domains – If you use our license management system and restrict via domains, you can now enter multiple domains on a per-license basis. This is useful if you want to use the same license for local, staging, and production.
  • License Management UI Updates – We’ve simplified the list view in license management by removing some columns that were cluttering the screen. We’ve also lined up the action buttons better and will now notify you in the plugin/theme detail pages if you have license management enabled but no licenses associated with your product.

Infrastructure

  • The Kernl Analytics server was re-sized to be smaller. It was way over allocated.
  • Load testing was moved to a Kernl sub-domain. Prior to this it had a top-level domain.
  • Load testing servers that don’t come up after 3 minutes are removed from the load testing pool.
  • Session handling (for OAuth) has been moved to cookies. Prior to this we stored sessions in Redis.
  • We have removed our dependency on the ‘Q’ promise package on the Node.js app servers.

Blog Posts

Thats it for this month!

Introducing WordPress Load Testing

In November 2018 Kernl launched the closed beta of our new WordPress load testing service. After a lot of changes based on the feedback we received we’re finally bringing WordPress Load Testing out of beta and into general availability.

Why Load Test?

There are a lot of different reasons to load test.

  • Infrastructure and Hosting – Kernl WordPress load testing gives you confidence that you are making the right decisions with your infrastructure and hosting. Looking to change hosts but aren’t sure how big or expensive of a plan you need? Run a load test.
  • Performance Testing – Load testing gives you confidence that the SQL query you just wrote isn’t going to collapse your website under load.
  • Confidence with your clients – Load testing lets you tell your clients with confidence that their new website can handle 100,000 visitors a day without any degradation in response time.
WordPress Load Testing graph
Load Test of Kernl Blog (horizontally scaled)

How Does It Work?

Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing solution makes load testing your WordPress site a breeze. You only need verify your ownership of the site with an easy to use WordPress plugin and then start testing. No coding or infrastructure management needed.

Start a load test in 1 minute

How Much Does it Cost?

Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing is included with your Kernl subscription. Usage per plan is as follows:

Plan TypeLoad TestsMax DurationMachine HoursRetention
Old Plans215 min55 days
Solo1060 min530 days
Agency30120 min3090 days
Enterprise &
Above		100300 min100365 days

If your needs don’t fit neatly into one of these categories feel free to reach out. We’d be happy to create a custom plan to suit your needs.

Sign Up Now

To get started with easy WordPress load testing, sign up for Kernl .

What’s New With Kernl – November 2018

It has been a busy few months for Kernl. Lots of great work has gone into the WordPress load testing feature work as well as a few structural changes to increase reliability.

  • Cache moved to Redis – For as long as Kernl has existed our cache backend was powered by Memcached. We have now finished migrating to Redis hosted at Compose.io.
  • AngularJS Upgrade to 1.7.5 – Fairly straight-forward upgrade to Angular 1.7.5. We wanted to take advantage of performance improvements and few bug fixes.
  • WordPress Load Testing – Over the past few months we’ve been cooking up something new. Imagine if you could easily test performance changes to you or your client’s WordPress installation? Or be able to tell your client with confidence how many customers at a time their site can support (and what their experience will be like!). What if you could do all this without writing a single line of code or spinning up your own testing infrastructure? We’re ready to start beta testing so send an email to jack@kernl.us if you would like to be a part of it.