January 8, 2008

To provide comfortable and better working environments, the Springnote team has been working on speed improvements since the end of last October.

Today, I would like to introduce several hidden changes in Springnote.

Improvement on the page navigation panel

The recent speed improvement process was mainly focused on the page navigation panel due to the information on the panel took several seconds to load.

• The amount of data needed for opening a page has significantly decreased. For example, if you connect to a page, only essential data is downloaded and according to your path necessary data will be downloaded.
•  The scripts needed for loading have been optimized. Our engineers have checked the time required to load a page one by one and have found out the cause and the exact location that initially made the service slow.
• Also the bottleneck of the server has been tuned and a cache system has been added to increase response rates

Improvement in image loading

Before the improvement, all the contents and images need to be downloaded all together when opening a page. Now, contents of the page are downloaded first and then the images are downloaded one after another.

Addition of web servers

Have you heard that the Springnote service got favorable comments in Web 2.0 Expo Japan?

• The Springnote team has added web servers with an expectation of great increase in the number of users. From this, Springnote is now more comfortable and enjoyable.
• The network is working much faster and stable.
• The Load Balancer (a program that reports users' requests to one of the 'backend' servers) is also upgraded.

 The System Administration team has reported that the user respond time has been improved up to 80%. Can you feel the difference? =)

These are what have been developed through the recent improvements. The most difficult part of the improvements was maintaining permanent links and improving speed at the same time. We think that speed will be a lot faster if only the editing space is changed when opening a page or moving to another page. However, if we decide to give up permanent links, the advantage of maintaining permanent links will be diminished and this will be the most arguable issue for the Springnote team. So, if you have comments or thoughts on this issue, please feel free to give your opinions.

Since the service speed is the most important factor for users, I hope this improvement can meet many of your needs. We will continue in our effort for improvements until every user of Springnote is fully satisfied with our service.

Thank you.

The Springnote team