A Focus on Performance
This year has seen a steady increase in both PlantText’s user base as well as the volume of requests hitting our servers. Up to this point, PlantText had been using the publicly available PlantUML servers created and hosted by the amazing Arnaud Roques! Over time, PlantText has become a very large user of the public PlantUML’s servers; the volume of requests at peak hours began to regularly overwhelm those servers, leading to a lack of responsiveness in PlantText. So we decided, with Arnaud’s feedback, to create our own PlantUML server infrastructure.
First of all, we are very sorry that some requests for PlantUML diagrams were failing intermittently during peak usage. But, this is now permanently fixed. Take a look at the PlantUML component diagram above to see our new architecture. Everything from the “PlantUML Backend Load Balancer” down is new. What does this mean for you? Higher up-time and better responsiveness since all the PlantText and PlantUML servers are all in the same data center!
A Few Other Little Things
In addition to these architecture changes, Version 22 includes a few new features.
- We fixed a few slightly annoying bugs in various places.
- We added the Samples button to the editor to make it very quick and easy to open them up.
- But primarily we worked on the PlantUML infrastructure!
What’s Next?
Looking ahead, we have several things in the works for PlantText, informed primarily by the results from the recent Feature Poll earlier this year.
Save and store diagrams. This is the single most user-requested feature. The earliest versions of PlantText actually offered this capability, but we removed it in order to keep hosting costs down.
Paid subscriptions. We were surprised to receive so many requests for adding a paid subscription option that would remove ads. With the increased hosting costs to support better performance and diagram storage, subscriptions could help us keep the lights on around here!
It’s All About You
PlantText would be nothing without you, the folks using it every day all around the world. We are continually in awe of the following PlantText has garnered, and grateful for this community of users. Thank you for your patience through our growing pains. Your support and feedback over the years have helped shape PlantText into what it is today!