Infrastructure upgrades and increased performance

Starting at the end of the Fall 2022 semester, we made a series of infrastructure upgrades for the CHSSWeb system. These included routine, mandatory upgrades like security patches and upgrades designed to improve site speed and performance.

Framework Update:

We upgraded to the latest version of the Rails framework. This upgrade contained security patches, bug fixes, code improvements and new framework features. 

Language Update:

We upgraded the version of Ruby used by CHSSWeb. This upgrade contained language level performance improvements, security updates and new language features.

Database Upgrade:

We upgraded our database. This update contained security patches, bug fixes and improvements.

Server Upgrades:

In addition to the routine server updates and patches we perform, we also upgraded our server configurations with an aim toward increasing performance across all websites in the system and on all devices. 

Overall Impact:

Taken together, these upgrades and improvements are producing between a 40% and 50% improvement in overall system performance.

We continually perform routine, but necessary, updates and maintenance for CHSSWeb. These tasks happen in the background, as they should, but, in this case, we wanted to share these with you given their scope and impact on system on impact performance.