Making Splitwise Faster

(Updated 3AM) Splitwise just went through some “impromptu scheduled downtime” to make improvements to our server, and Splitwise is now way faster. We still are gathering data, but it seems to be about a factor of two more snappy. We apologize only giving a few minutes advance warning, but it’s so much snappier and it finished right on time! You’ll love it.

Thanks so much for bearing with our growing pains, and sorry to any users affected in the last hour or two. Technical details after the jump.

For fellow entrepreneurs and technical enthusiasts, what we’ve done is move our database from a Heroku shared database to an AWS dedicated database. We’re generally fans of Heroku, but we didn’t like the pricing on the first non-shared database tier, and Amazon was kind enough to furnish us with a substantial starter credit for being part of the TechStars network.

This also means we are converting from PostgreSQL to mySQL.

Thanks so much to our loyal beta testers, who have patiently dealt with a slow server for the last several months, when we could not afford a better server!