Unleashing our cache for speed and stability

We know you love Shopmonkey and we understand how much you rely on us to keep your auto shop humming smoothly. But just like an engine, certain parts of the app experience more than their fair share of heat and pressure. Over time we have to continue to tune the car.

Lately, you may have felt a bit of a "slowness" during busy times. We get it. Time is money; you have jobs to finish, not seconds to waste. So we understand that high performance and rock-solid reliability are the implicit requirements of any vehicle.

That's why we've been under the hood making improvements to Redis, our all-important cache layer, by upgrading to an industrial-grade platform called Redis Enterprise. Our ability to cache data efficiently is a top driver of your Shopmonkey experience, so this upgrade means we can focus on what we do best and spend less time tinkering with resource management. With this new platform, we'll have the resources we need when needed, providing stability and consistency to your in-app experience.

But we didn't just stop at an upgrade. We've also been working hard to rev up the overall performance of Redis by making some significant changes. Here's a peek at what we've been working on:

1. Goodbye blocking commands: In the past, we used certain Redis commands that could sometimes slow things down when called against extensive collections of keys or elements (read: large services, estimates, etc.). We've replaced these with the commands SCAN and SSCAN, which return only a few elements per call, keeping things zippy.
2. Splitting one big cluster into multiple: Our Redis data was previously segmented across many logical databases. Which resulted in a massive data cluster that was difficult to scale, monitor and troubleshoot. We've moved these logical databases to dedicated hardware, improving speed and reducing the friction that was the cause of many recent performance incidents.
3. Deploying Cache Cluster in Redis Enterprise: Despite our best efforts, our cache layer still has a few quirks. As mentioned earlier, Redis Enterprise has been a game-changer, allowing us to shard data across multiple nodes and tap into the power of multiple cores.
4. Coming soon - Pruning operations: It's not yet ready for prime time. However, we will soon eliminate the cache operations that needlessly slow things down. This will improve the app's overall performance, making your Shopmonkey experience snappier.

The bottom line? While we're working hard to deliver Shopmonkey V2 in the coming months, we are committed to keeping the current Shopmonkey you know and love running as smoothly and efficiently as possible. With these improvements, we believe you'll notice a significant speed boost in your day-to-day experience with Shopmonkey, so you can spend those precious seconds off the keyboard and under the hood.