The past few days have been consumed working on some very technical parts of the site. There are millions of lines of data stored in databases which run the site. Every time you send a message a new entry is made, when the receiver opens it that entry status is changed to read. The total number of database read, write, update and deletes is mind blowing. Mid afternoon UK time (which is a quiet time) the site is processing about 10,000 database requests per minute.

MySQL questions per minute

All this is very dull and technical and as a user of the site I think you really only care about speed. Therefore I have working on optimising the code make every database action as fast a possible. Speeding up one area has an impact on all other areas as there is less of queue building up. The chart below shows the overall CPU usage for the databases. You can see a huge decrease in the past few hours.

Reduction in MySQL CPU load

In real-life terms the profile page now loads in a fraction of second instead of 1 or 2 seconds at busy times. Filtering messages and favourites is almost instantaneous. As soon as you click or tap the page appears. There is nothing more to add, just enjoy the new levels of speed and usability!