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.

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.

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!

Thanks,

Francesca Moyse | Founder | francesca@monkeyanalytics.com

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!

Currently, we are working on (1) general improvements*, (2) support for high memory / cpu 64 bit sessions, and (3) support for hardcore subscribers to install packages themselves.

If your feature isn’t here, please let us know – happy to talk about when it will show up.

* If you’re interested in behind the scenes detail – these include better Octave, Python, and R error handling and better figure generation support. A dirty little secret is that we haven’t actually implemented our disk quotas yet, so we need to do that too