Strava upload times: some performance stats

On February 17, 2010 Strava moved to a new hosted environment (EngineYard) and cloud data storage (Amazon S3). As many of our users noticed, it took us several days to get things tuned properly for performance. Where this was most noticeable was on uploads. We saw upload times spike into several minutes, often throwing errors where files didn’t upload at all. Over the course of the following week our dev team worked hard to improve performance. As is typical in these situations, each solution implemented revealed the next layer of the problem. But, after nearly 10 days of searching for the small fixes that add up to big improvements, Strava’s dev team had gotten site performance and upload times in particular to a great place. You can see for yourself in this chart showing the daily average upload times (in seconds) from Feb 8 – Mar 9, 2010.