WRMD 3.0: Speed

Lets Talk About Speed

(Warning: this blog post is kind of "techy")

wrmd servers

We are acutely aware of the speed issues that WRMD is currently facing and to be honest it's actually very embarrassing. Basically (at the risk of sounding arrogant) the problem is stemming from our growing popularity. The number of accounts and their users continues to grow and unfortunately our servers aren't keeping up with the demand. That's all going to change in WRMD 3.0. WRMD has grown far from being a simple application used by a handful of rehab organizations. It's now a full on web application that has very serious demands on it. As such, it needs to have a scalable server backbone and a framework built for optimization of resources. Without trying to sound to "techy" I'll explain how the demand will be able to scale as needed.

Our server setup will use a load balancer to distribute traffic to as many web-servers as needed. So if demand gets high during the summer then we can just add an additional web-server to help with all your requests. Those web-servers will only be responsible for displaying WRMD to you, while behind them will be a very large database server that will handle all the heavy lifting. If this doesn't make any sense to you then just check out the diagram above.

Servers are only part of the speed equation, the software itself also needs to be efficient at everything it does. A major part of our development in WRMD 3.0 is to maximize its efficiency. Rather than explaining all the nerdy things that we are doing in detail I'll just tell you that everywhere that we can cache, queue, optimize or schedule a task in WRMD 3.0, we are. Our goal among other things is to have WRMD 3.0 be as quick and responsive as possible so that this database is not slowing you down from helping your patients.