Jun 19

Written by: Matt Abar
6/19/2009 7:52 AM

One of the benefits of building software from scratch is that you can eliminate limitations of existing systems. Sometimes this comes from better design, but often the new functionality comes at a cost, either in slower software speed or more complicated code maintenance. With Techfi, a good example of this was having current values and other calculations available in the software without having to run reports. In order to do this, we moved some of the business logic into the database, which made our imports take longer* than other systems.

With FinFolio we've taken it even further. Not only are we still putting current values on the screens, we're adding errors and alerts and other more sophisticated business logic to make it easier for advisors to troubleshoot data and otherwise manage their accounts. This time, we're paying for it (in technology terms) by having a business object layer that massages and cross-checks your data as it gets imported, edited and changed. Most of the speed issues that we're fixing now came from these architectural tradeoffs. The good news is that we have a lot more control over the technology now so we can code our way around the speed problems, whereas our hands were often tied at Techfi -- FinFolio's technology cost will be in code maintenance rather than speed.

We're releasing the speed fixes in two batches.

We're releasing an update this afternoon where edit screens open faster and FinFolio is much more efficient about using CPU cycles. The really big changes won't happen until next week, when we fix the remaining issues, which are only apparent in large databases. The account and main list screens are still too slow and we're changing the way we're run queries to speed them up. We'll also fix the import speed, which is where most of the architectural tweaking is happening. We are replicating some of the business logic on the database (similar to Techfi) so we can import transactions and prices quickly without having to drag excessive amounts of data down to the object layer.

We're confident that we'll have everything running at Techfi speeds by next week's update.

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* The Techfi "cost" of slow imports was really only an issue in the early days of the company. Database hardware got so fast and so cheap that the problem simply disappeared. Almost ten years later, I can run an import on my desktop workstation in 20 minutes that would have taken us 3 hours and $50k of hardware back in the Techfi days.

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