How Far We've Come

"There's no better time to cut back than when you're growing," said Amjad.

We've been working on this project in earnest for 10 weeks now.

When you're in the thick of improving things all you can see is what remains undone, so it's good to look at how far you've come!

Towards the end of September, we had multiple incidents where latency across Replit rose to unacceptable levels (the median request to the site could take 10 seconds).

We were embarrassed.

We had embarked on a stability sprint and the site felt worse.

Increased load on Replit and in particular our legacy Classroom product seemed to have tipped us over a cliff.

We added followers to our Postgres database and allowed people to export their classrooms into the much-more-stable Teams for Education, but it wasn't enough.

We wanted to stop reacting to growth and put the web app on a solid footing.

So we took the time to evenly distribute Postgres connections across all follower databases, cached the most frequently queried objects, and put rate limits in place.

Since then latency has looked flat and boring.

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