LandlordMax V3.11 Sneak Peak
Although we wanted to launch LandlordMax version 3.11 late tonight, I’ve decided to push it back another day. We’re almost there, we just found one last very minor bug that I’d like to clean up before we go live (I’m a perfectionist at heart when it comes to LandlordMax). In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak of the release notes (minus one main feature).
It’s just as well that we delayed it one day because while I was finishing up creating the last of the Release Notes tonight, I couldn’t come up with a good way to represent some of the very major speed improvements we’ve done in this version. The database I was playing with to create this particular animated tutorial consists of:
- 30,394 Accounting Entries (483 pages worth of entries)
- 921 Scheduled Accounting Entries
- 2,293 Tenants
- 2,414 Units
- 247 Buildings
- 75 Vendors
- 14,282 Invoices
- 2,182 Scheduled Invoices
- 13,950 Receipts
- 2,182 Scheduled Receipts
- 19,149 Workorders
All this was running on my desktop that’s almost three years old now (it runs on a basic P4, 2.4Gz Intel processor). To view the Accounting Entries Workarea which includes displaying 30,394 entries (I didn’t apply any filtering) and process the 921 Scheduled Accounting Entries (to see if any Suggested Accounting Entries are due), it took about 4 seconds! And that’s while I was running a video and audio recorder capturing everything going on on my screen!!! Without the recorders, the time significantly drops.
So all this to say, we’re extremely close to releasing LandlordMax version 3.11. I suspect it will be tomorrow night in the wee hours of the night. You always want to release your software when it affects the least amount of people, when you have the least amount of traffic to your website, which is generally late at night when everyone’s sleeping.
In any case, as I mentioned above, if you’re interested in getting a sneak peak, you can see a preview of the release notes for LandlordMax version 3.11 here.
Let me know what you think.
· November 28th, 2006 · 2:10 pm · Permalink
That sounds like some very impressive performance. If I am correct from what I observed in your screen shots, your reporting system uses JFreeReport. Do you have any plans to switch to JFreeReport 0.9 when it becomes production-ready? According to the latest update on the JFree forums, 0.9 is supposed to have much better performance.
· November 28th, 2006 · 2:53 pm · Permalink
Hi Ryan,
Thanks! We’ve really been pushing the performance envelop for version 3.11. We’re also expecting to do some other great performance enhancements for the next version which we had to postpone to the next version for now. To give you a little teaser, we found out with the help of JProfiler, that the database engine we use is less efficient when we make calls on the results with the column name versus the column index. This might seem silly, but we found that with larger datasets it becomes more and more noticeable, enough that I personally believe it’s worth it. So we’re hoping to also add this change sooner than later.
As for JFreeReport, you’re absolutely right, we do use it. It’s a great piece of Open Source software!
In regards to performance, as far as I understood the biggest gains were in upgrading to 0.8.9-10 I even posted a message to the forum about this. Based on the performance differences, and the fact that version 0.8 (based on information from their head developer) will eventually be able to print combined reports (which is great if you want to print multiple invoices directly within the invoice list) we definitely upgraded to the latest 0.8 version.
As for version 0.9, I didn’t realize they were planning on offering that much of a performance enhancement. Do you have any links to some of the discussions, I’d be very interested in reading up on it.
As for upgrading LandlordMax to 0.9, this is definitely in our road map, it’s just a matter of when. As with any software, a large part of the decision is the cost to benefit analysis.
With version 3.11 we just upgraded from an older version to the latest, and this involved a very significant amount of effort. Every single report had to be modified and adjusted in many places (over 100 reports), as well the code base had changed in many ways which required a good number of code changes in our application as well.
So to answer your question, yes we plan to upgrade, it’s just a matter of when.
· November 28th, 2006 · 3:16 pm · Permalink
I just wanted to add to my previous comment, when I say that the other performance enhancements become more noticeable with size, by this I mean tables with over 50,000 entries! The difference is a few seconds compared to virtually instantaneous. If you look at the performance video from the release notes, this means that the 4 seconds to process 30,000 accounting entries and 1,000 scheduled accounting entries, would probably drop down to under 1 second! Of course since I’m recording the video and audio on the same three year old computer, it’ll be a little bit more, but it would be almost undetectable.
We decided that for version 3.11 this was already such a large performance enhancement that it wasn’t worth delaying releasing it anymore for a few seconds of processing only for very large databases. Not many of our customers have 2000+ units stored in one desktop application.
· December 2nd, 2006 · 3:53 pm · Permalink
Sorry, I have been busy and forgot to check your response.
The forum at
https://www.jfree.org/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=21
discusses JFreeReport 0.9.
Of particular interest: The “Roadmap: JFreeReport” topic discusses a lot of the performance inprovements, and the “0.8 Compatibility” topic mentions that a compatability layer will be available for older versions of JFreeReport.
· December 3rd, 2006 · 11:22 pm · Permalink
Thank you for the link. I just took a preliminary look at it does look very interesting. I will definitely be following this closely.
Btw, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet, if any of you reading this are new to JFreeReport, go check them out. They have an excellent product!