Studio Course Listing Home Performance

Created by Marco Morales (Deactivated)
Last updated: Feb 25, 2021
3 min read

TL;DR: Studio’s Home page lists all courses and libraries you have access to. For some of our partners, this view had become very slow to load or wouldn’t load at all. With recent changes, we have reduced page load time between 67 and 97% (depending on the load metric you review.)

TL;UseEmoji:

Engineering Lead: @Ahtisham Shahid
Product Lead: Marco Morales 

What is it?
Behind the scenes, we made changes to the Studio Home Listing page to reduce its load time. Previously this page loaded your courses & libraries but now libraries are loaded as a secondary request. There is no user-facing interface change here, just page load time.


Key talking points for customers:

Why work on this area of the platform?
This page is a highly visible landing page for partners, and this issue has been a longstanding issue for partners like Harvard + MIT that they have built cumbersome workarounds to still function. Recently the list of partners impacted has risen as more courses and content libraries have been created, elevating our need to prioritize an initial fix.

Who will notice the change, and where?
Today 55 partners (out of 160) have created content using content libraries, so this change is more obvious to this fraction of our partners.

What impact will it have on course development teams?

For some, the ability to load their course list page at all, and for others a much faster response time to load this page.


Results

Reduction in Page Load Times

After the fix landed on production we saw significant improvement in Studio course listing page load time. Across four key loading times (measured in seconds) we saw major improvements when comparing the month before release with the past 9 days since release:

  • 99% of requests load in 11.6 seconds or less, an improvement of 68%, down from 36.5s.

  • 95% of requests load in 7.3 seconds or less, an improvement of 61%, down from 18.8s.

  • 50% of requests load in 1.8 seconds or less, an improvement of 61%, down from 4.7s.

  • Our average server response time is 0.18s, an improvement of 97.5%, down from 7.3s.

Reduction in Page Timeouts:

It is also exciting to see that there have been no page timeouts since the fix went live. Below is a graph that shows the number of Studio timeouts that drastically fall after the fix went live. Timeouts occur whenever the Studio Home Page took so long to load that the system gives up trying to load.

Additional Details & Data References

Page Load Server Time Comparison: The following graph shows the current page load duration (green line) and compares it with page load times from the previous week (blue dotted line).

 

Credits / A Group Effort!

Thanks to the T&L - Pakistan team for driving this fix forward (@Ahtisham Shahid , @Awais Jibran (Deactivated) , et al) as well as other members of the T&L squad who helped. Special thanks also to@sburch (Deactivated) for identifying the approach and specific fix, giving the team clear direction for this major improvement. Thanks also to the partner support team members for raising this issue (@Lena Lewenstein (Deactivated) , @Emilio Rodriguez (Deactivated) ) and for following up with partners to ensure the experience is improved for them.