The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the premier Internet standards body, developing open standards through open processes. The IETF is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. The IETF standards-setting process is open to any individual interested in providing technical contributions.
The performance challenges that IETF faced
IETF was experiencing performance issues with their Datatracker application (written in Django and using a MariaDB database). The app assists IETF contributors with managing the workflows and artifacts needed to produce the standards that make the Internet successful.
Performance issues became more and more of a concern to IETF over the years. Contributors expressed frustration with the Datatracker application frequently, so IETF wanted to gain insight into what they could change to best effect both the actual and perceived performance of the application.
Robert Sparks, IETF Tools Team Project Manager, began by looking to solve the issues without the assistance of a performance tool by writing his own custom instrumentation. However, another path would soon open up.
Discovering a solution for IETF: enter Scout
Instead, he discovered Scout would be able to give them the visibility they wanted without the time and bandwidth it would take to come up with their own custom solution.
“With Scout, we were able to get the visibility we wanted without doing all this instrumentation on our own.”
— Robert Sparks, IETF Tools Team Project Manager
With the assistance of Scout, IETF was able to identify architectural issues that had been a growing pain for years. Initially, the team was able to make very quick tactical adjustments, but the real improvements came from the significant changes they made to the way the application is constructed.
How using Scout can flip the performance script – for the better
The insights from Scout (specifically, performance and frequency of use) allowed IETF to make dramatic improvements to their code. Their team was able to look into the performance of some of their worst-performing views, and identified the need for longer-term platform and application architecture changes.
Utilizing Scout’s overview calculations and web-endpoint views, IETF was able to further guide their efforts, with both hard and soft results:
- Mean response time decreased from 1800–2000 ms to 100–200 ms
- Unsolicited positive feedback from a community of volunteers
- Data to back effective architectural decisions
“Scout’s leadership and development team went out of their way to bring our volunteers up to speed in real-time. That willingness and agility was exceptional, and we truly appreciate the high level of helpful engagement.”
— Robert Sparks, IETF Tools Team Project Manager
Try Scout APM
Scout APM is application performance monitoring designed to help developers across multiple languages quickly pinpoint and resolve performance issues before the customer ever sees them. Scout APM streamlines proactive and real-time insight, via easy package installation, into performance issues like N+1 queries, memory bloat, and other abnormalities with tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code.
Find out more here: https://www.scoutapm.com/features/app-traces
