Over the past few of months, various fixes and improvements have been made to the Builder process, which builds the pages and support files on the CPAN Testers Reports website. As mentioned in the last summary, this has made a noticeable improvement in the performance of the server. However, there were further fixes and enhancements planned.

Several updates ensued during January, not just for the Builder, but across several parts of the eco-system, both to speed up processing and to reduce the amount of file and database access. Previously several processes recreated their current view by reading the full result set from the database. As we now have over 10 million reports, this can take more time than is reasonable. With the use of the JSON files to record a snapshot, we can now start from a known point, thus meaning we only need to scan a few thousand records. This method has been utlised in other processes, even with smaller database tables and datasets, and the performance improvements have been significant.

For the past couple of weeks we have now been able to update pages within 36 hours of a report being submitted, and at times we have even been less than an hour behind. Looking at the graphs the Builder is now consistently processing more pages than reports. Even though January is typically a quieter month for us, it still produced 333,157 reports. We shall see whether the increased submissions in the coming months make a difference in build times.

You may already know that the 2011 QA Hackathon is happening in Amsterdam this year, but it warrants promotion. While the focus is typically on traditional aspects of QA and testing, hopefully there will be some CPAN Testers projects featured. The hackathon takes place from Saturday 16th April to Monday 18th April, at the offices of principal sponsors, Booking.com. If you're interested in attending, please add your name to the Attendees list, and also add what Projects you want to work on.

Rounding off this summary, an update of the tester mappings reveals we have gained at least 27 new testers, with a total of 38 new mappings. It's interesting to note that many of the new testers are not CPAN Authors, which is great. One of the benefits to CPAN Testers is that you can help to contribute to the project without having to be a hardcore Perl dev, and can contribute as little or as much as you are able. We are fast approaching 11 million test reports and I'm pleased to see we are continually encouraging new people to get involve and keep the submissions rising. Long may it continue.