When you add as many users to a system as we have in the last six months on Raceday, you learn a lot about how the system reacts to stress.
For the most part, Raceday reacted very well. But recently we did notice where the fault lines were thinking about forming.
Where the stress showed up was mostly in the newer features like the Race Setup and the Running Order. In January and into February we noticed that when there were dozens of events going on with thousands of drivers using the system, getting into the Running Order was just too slow for a software with a slogan of #SpeedMatters.
Like you, we are big fans of speed: Speed is good. Speed is life. Speed is sexy. Raceday MUST be blazing fast.
So we started doing some digging and quickly figured out we’ve just outgrown our old database application and it’s time to move on to a faster, more useful tool.
In the next few weeks, we will be rolling out the newest release of Raceday, and the Database change will be all wrapped up. This release means nothing to the users, as no feature changes or enhancements will be part of this release.
However, our power users (certified Raceday Ninja’s) will notice some extreme speed differences. In some spots, you’ll think you just traded your old Volkswagen for a Ferrari. There are also some subtle changes to some features that I will detail after the rollout.
As you can imagine, taking this much data and swapping the tool that holds it and talks to the rest of the application is no small matter. There have been weeks of late nights and weekends to get this done, and J.D. and Grant have been kicking butt and taking names.
The great thing about this change is that it will make the new features we are working on faster to complete, test and rollout. So some pretty big stuff is coming down the assembly line in the early summer. More on that as we get closer.
So thank you to those two, and all our clients — both those who have been around a while and all our new people. We so look forward to making racing better for everyone and making Raceday the fastest way possible to setup and manage a race event.
Having to switch databases to make Raceday faster because of all the new people is a quality problem to have, and I like solving quality problems like that.