Caspio Server Performance

[ClayG]

I started working in the Caspio platform in November 2021. Since then I have built 5 different apps and I have deployed over 80 datapages. Our record counts are not huge. Across all my apps, we have around 660K records in total. I also completed their certified developer program shortly after it was released. I'm a fan of the platform.

The one and only thing that continues to frustrate me within Caspio regards application server performance. Perhaps the database server gets overly busy too, but I suspect it's most often the application/web servers that get slow. When I watch Ned do his training videos, the speed and performance of Caspio is great. Nearly instant response all the time. In contrast, I'm on Site 14 - b8.caspio.com, and the only time I can consistently enjoy speedy response from Caspio is outside of typical business hours. During business hours, performance is up and down.

I have opened tickets with Caspio support *many* times about performance throughout 2022. I've since given up. I follow best practices with regard to design, and we don't have a ton of simultaneous users. Peak usage? We'll average around 10 users per day using various apps that I've written. I have only 5 modest table triggers in place, and these rarely fire -- just a few times a day, updating single values in simple tables.

When our Caspio site is slow, it's slow everywhere... it's slow as I'm just trying to navigate within the Caspio admin interface... it's slow as I use any of the datapages I have developed... it's sometimes even very slow just trying to login to Caspio. 

I had someone contact me via LinkedIn to ask if I might help them with their Caspio apps. I had to decline but they shared that their biggest frustration was also the slow performance of their apps.

Comments? Is the relatable for anyone else? My suspicion is that I'm on a busy site (site 14 - b8). The Caspio System Health site isn't very informative for this. It's limited in what it checks. 

[vidierre]

I read only now this post and I would like if others could share their performance experience here.
It should be done providing some structured data from your Account Setting page.

My experience is this

Account Information
CASPIO site:  Site 08 - eu1.caspio.com Data center location: Ireland  CASPIO Plan Grow
APP scenario
3 app bult on 128 datapages
Users based on Italy, about 10 concurrent by day
App deployed using a Wordpress frontend hosted on Kinsta
APP resources utilization
625K records and 2GB of storage
In the last 3 month an average daily data transfer of about 200MB with a max of 566MB

Our experience
On average there is a performance decrease from 7:00AM (GMT) until 8:30-9:00AM (GMT). It is sensible and users complain about it, but it's not that dramatic to claim unuseful it.
Randomly we had other more severe slowdowns, but non of them was more than 5-10 minute.

My Opinion
It is certainly an area where improvements could be made, but there are other more important related to the App business process. Like ones related to authorizations and events management.
I am afraid that if apps have to scale their user base, a Corporate Plan is a must. But it mean at least a x3 in price.
Up to now, for bigger apps, I start directly with others more suited platforms/programming models.  Even if I consider CASPIO one of the top low-code platforms from a developing speed point of view.
My suggestion
- It may seem obvious, but you must choose your location very carefully when creating an account.
- The second area of attention is the front end. In my case we have an excellent web pages response time and when I say "perfomance decrease" I am referring to the CASPIO wheel. But you must analize where your performance issues came from. 
 

[Flowers4Algernon]

Hello! I just wanted to share this site that Caspio Support have provided where we can monitor the performance for our sites: https://secure-stats.pingdom.com/iqlwozbl4t08?_ga=2.103333833.879441684.1608567588-789078893.1607962611

[vidierre]

@Flowers4Algernon thank you. 

At a first look I was going to answer that this is only an avaliability monitor, but when I read that it was a pingdom service I went deeper.
On the initial panel if you click on your server some performace data can be retrived. As example for my server I can read this data for April:

and an avarage response time of 681ms. Remember that I am on a Grow plan, it means shared resources. Everyone should remember the difference in terms of performance.
Of course anyone who has worked on the performance of real data centers knows that these value are not the real user-perceived respinse time. But are a very solid base to make considerations.

This strengthens my thinking about that CASPIO is an excellent choice for app adressing mid-size environments. Or at least the non-Company plans are excellent for an audience up to 50-100 users. I believe that the rule that "for greater users base you need more dedicated resources" is true for all platform.
One can argue that Caspio Corporate plans are expensive or that the price progression has an excessive surge between the two worlds. But nothing about the offer completeness.