Some Performance Improvements

I’ve been noticing that the site hasn’t seemed quite as responsive as it once was.  Up until this point, we have spent basically zero time thinking about performance and how to make the site faster.  

Today I started thinking about some possibilities.  I considered various caching options and then decided to look at the database.  I started by adding one index to one of our database tables.  This index has had a pretty significant impact on the performance.  

Before the index:

The show a task page:

• 3.5 requests per second
• 285 milliseconds per request

The task index page:

• 1.5 requests per second
• 656 milliseconds per request

After the index:

The show a task page:

• 5.3 requests per second
• 188 milliseconds per request

The task index page:

• 4.5 requests per second
• 220 milliseconds per request