Basecamp Performance: Message Boards, Docs & Files, and Activity

We've made Basecamp a lot faster across the product. Weeks of chasing performance outliers and general optimizations have netted a wide range of improvements. Here's a quick tour:

Message Boards

Looking at individual messages on a project could in many cases take up to a second, but thanks to improvements in how we use our databases, we've been able to reduce that right down to around the sweet spot of 200ms.

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Request time for messages, database latency in blue

Docs & Files

We made the document previews faster, tweaked pagination, and the display of user avatars to make this entire section snappier. It is especially noticeable on the top 1% of projects that store the most large documents and files, as illustrated in the graph below.

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Great latency reduction for projects that contain lots of large documents and files (p99)

Activity

We managed to reduce the worst-case times for loading the recent activity report in big accounts by 50%, be it recent activity for yourself or for other people in your account. Before our work, these worst-case times could be up to five seconds.

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Activity report latency reduced by around 50% (p99)

While Basecamp has always been really fast for 99% of accounts, every improvement on the top 1% of accounts buys more breathing room for our underlying infrastructure, giving us more head room when we encounter surges in traffic or usage that benefit all.

It also means you can feel comfortable that even if your account should one day grow very large, we're working to ensure that it stays snappy.

Enjoy the faster Basecamp!