It’s been a long slog, but the result is exciting. We are entering a heavy test week or two for the v1 codebase and will soon be pushing it live!
It’s interesting how things turn out – this re-architecture took advantage of our learnings over the past year, and will help us scale more efficiently, server greater numbers of users, and deliver a more robust experience. What we didn’t expect was that this would speed up the interface even further (than our previous speed-focused-improvements). But it has!
The new site feels like you are running your commands on native hardware in terms of responsiveness. We can’t wait to share! Sorry for the long wait, but we believe that you ship when you’re ready.
First and foremost, thank you for all of your support and feedback over the past few months. With your continued excitement over our product, it makes it even easier to work to the wee hours of the morning to create a product that suits your news. Since our launch, we have had incredible demand and feature requests. This has been very exciting to us but also has put us in firefighter mode. We have decided that now is the time to step back, take the lessons we have learned, and fix issues that we are facing in our system. During this time frame, all accounts will be accessible but our system may not function like expected. We apologize for this inconvenience but we are working hard to make this a solid, reliable product.
To all of our paying customers: from now until we hit v1.0, all of your accounts will be free. If you wish to be refunded for past months, please let us know as we will be happy to oblige.
This is the time to send feature requests as well as comments. We can’t promise to have your features implemented for Version 1.0 but we can keep your feature requests in our minds with this restart.
Thanks for all of your support. Without all of you, we would be shutting the project down. However, since we know that the demand is high for such a product, we are further excited about the prospects of Monkey Analytics.
With more and more interest in Monkey Analytics, James, our original Rocketmonkey, has shifted more of his attention to Monkey Analytics! Thanks, James! During the short amount of time that he has increased his focus, he has drastically improved the usability of the product. We will be pushing out these changes in the near term. So stay tuned!
Update: another round of bugfixes were just pushed out, keeping with 37signals philosophy we are honing in on rock solid basic functionality – command entry, return, and plotting. If you continue to have any issues with this please let us know!
Figures currently exhibit some funky behavior (such as refresh after every command), we are currently working to fix this and will be updating the site in the near term.
If you are one of our unfortunate users who is exceeding their storage allotment, you might be frustrated that we didn’t tell you which of your sessions, scripts, or data files are causing you trouble. This is no longer a problem – clicking on “All Data” now shows you how much space each data file is using. Delete troublesome files (and download them first if you like) and you’ll be able to get back to computing.
If you need that extra space – consider upgrading your account. If you’re a free user generating enough data to run into our limits you might want to consider supporting the site. And if you’re a paid user, you get quite a bit more at each upgrade level.
If you continue to have problems with storage limits let us know, but we think this should resolve it for everyone.
Wow, it has been an exciting month. The demand for Monkey Analytics is steadily increasing as well as the number of servers that are puting online. Thanks to everyone for using our product and passing along bug reports as well as feature requests.
We have some unfortunate news for some of you that have been really *enjoying* our system. We had a bug in our storage allocation scheme that pretty much allowed anyone to have a field day creating gigantic files. Sorry guys, this will be no more. You will now be limited to your subscription storage allotment. As a result some of your accounts will no longer work as you have already surpassed your usage limits. For now, you can delete large sessions (many variables) or large files; if this doesn’t work please contact us and we will get you back online. We plan to give users better tools to manage this in the near future but needed to push this latest bug fix out as these files have caused huge disruption to our users.
For our paying customers, we realize that these serious disruptions are no fun. If you are dissatisfied with your service, please let us know so we can refund your account for this month.
What more can we say but more bug fixes. It seems that we broke some core functionality (Upload Data for one) when we did our huge refactoring to increase the responsivity of MA. Sorry to those we inconvenienced.
Incorporated with this launch, download data. That is right! You can now download your data files from the site. Coming soon, download scripts!
Bugfixes aren’t as sexy as big feature launches, but we thought our devoted users might like to know that we’re working on the little stuff too. And sometimes, the little stuff that goes wrong and slows you down can have an equivalent impact to sexy feature launches – at least we think so!
We’ve fixed over 15 bugs since our launch last week. The good news is that these were all small bugs that just caused annoying 505 error pages and perhaps some functionality (deleting a script, for instance) to not quite do what you expected.
We’re tracking down a couple other trickier nuisance bugs, then back onto the development roadmap we laid out earlier.
We’ve been radio silent for a bit because we were heads-down developing and debugging a set of features which launched today. So if you’re wondering what we’ve been up to – you can find out here!
1. Huge performance boost: in our performance discussion, we mentioned that round-trips between commands could take 5 seconds. Ouch! This is no longer the case – most commands now complete in < 1 second so that you feel almost as if you are developing locally. We always had an architecture in mind to deliver this, but it was far more complex to build than we expected. The end result is worth it – and we hope you love it as much as we do.
2. Plotting improvements: as part of this architecture upgrade, we’ve fixed our handling of Octave / Matlab and Python plotting – Python matplotlib plots now function correctly the majority of the time, and many more Matlab commands such as hold and gcf now function properly.
3. Rename your sessions: if you click on a session’s name in an open session or session info screen you’ll get a popup asking for your new session name – so if you didn’t like what you called your session to start with (or don’t like the “Default” we give you when you first sign in) feel free to change it!
Now that this huge change is launched, we look forward to getting back to our laundry list of smaller items that have been annoying us (as well as the next big item – 64 bit high memory machines as an option). As always, if you find a bug we missed, let us know!
Some users are asking for benchmarks so we thought we’d share what you can expect in terms of performance. Monkey Analytics is running on Amazon EC2 servers – 1.7GB RAM, 1GHz Xeon/Opteron equivalent machines with plenty of disk space. Free users may be sharing such a machine with other free users, but paid subscribers will have effectively dedicated machines.
If you run an Octave session and execute tic / toc commands before and after your scripts, you will observe that computations are fast, as you would expect given these specs.
However, if you measure the time to submit a command and receive results you’ll simple commands can take 4 seconds to complete. We are improving this – on our development servers we return simple commands in under a second, and we’ll keep pushing on this until it’s unnoticable.
In summary, our computational performance is great, but our perceived performance has room to improve.
We should launch a faster interface within the week – so stay tuned!
Everyone loves monkeys, right? That’s the theory at any rate. And we think they’re even more lovable when they are acting geeky. Without further ado – here are some new graphics we created for our User stories page:
You know the kind - two monitors aren't enough for the kind of analysis these monkeys do
These monkeys won't stop until they've pounded learnin' into your brain. (Bring bananas, not apples to class)
