I'm going to geek-out on this one a bit, so I apologize in advance. In writing the Update functionality of the new app a few years ago, it initially didn't run quite as quickly as the old app, so I spent quite a bit of time profiling it to find all the rough spots and get them smoothed out. I eventually got it to run quite a bit faster than the old app, patted myself on the back, and moved on. So I was a little surprised when one of our Arkansas users mentioned to Jay recently that they still use the old app for doing updates because it's just so much faster. Jay handed this comment to Jeff who brought it to me for consideration. He had already done some preliminary tests, what we call "benchmarks", to see if it also ran slowly for him, and sure enough, it did.

We decided to see if we could roll back in time to see if my observations about the speed weren't just some kind of sad hallucination. And nope, they weren't. It really was fast when I originally developed it. So what happened, and when?

Long story short, Jeff spent two-and-a-half days doing pretty much nothing but trying to figure out what had happened. And over the ensuing weekend, I had a flash of insight into what I thought the problem might be. He spent some time following up my hunch, and finally wound up adding a single line of code that increased our Update response processing speed by a factor of 8X. Sometimes it's like that.

So if you've been cussing your updates on the new app, help is on the way, in your next release.