Bubble_timer

Can You Speed up Time?

I'll leave the heady question about speeding up time to the physicists, but why would you want to? I'm always trying (in vain) to slow down time. What you can speed up is BubbleTimer. It's now been 2 weeks since BubbleTimer's servers got a major upgrade. There is now roughly 6 times the computing power on tap as there was before, and a key piece of system software was upgraded as well, and it is delivering additonal performance improvements on the software side.

I kept the announcement fairly quiet, other than mentioning the maintenance window (BubbleTimer was down for about 15 minutes during the cut over to the new servers). I didn't want to announce that a big performance increase was imminent and then dissapoint if the improvements didn't live up to my expectations.

Now that I have 2 weeks of performance numbers in, I can safely say that for the slowest operation, navigating to a different day, BubbleTimer is about 4 times faster than it was. Similar improvements exist across the other operations that were computationally intensive, but since those were not as noticably slow, you're less likely to recognize the improvements.

I hope better performance increases your enjoyment of BubbleTimer and encourages you to use it, when you need to, to keep yourself on track with how your spending your time. It's no fair having an activity called waiting on BubbleTimer anymore!

Posted by Sean Johnson 19/11/2009 at 15h04


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  1. Qrystal about 2 hours later:

    I have a theory that time is always speeding up. We just don't have anything else to compare it to, except the ticking of clocks and the orbiting of the sun and all the other stuff that is sped up alongside the speeding up of time itself.

    It still all comes down to what we do with the time we have, even if that time seems to be passing faster and faster all the time. So, thank goodness for BubbleTimer!

  2. Sean Johnson 1 day later:

    Yes, it would seem that as long as everything was equally sped up or slowed down, everything including human perception, cognition and aging, then we'd probably never know. It also seems that this just an epistemological limitation though. In this case the rate of change would have indeed changed, despite it being unknowable to us.

    Better minds than mine have spent considerable time on these problems though. I prefer philosophical inquiry with more immediate practical impact.

    Sean

  3. Ian Varley 1 day later:

    Speeded up or slowed down in relation to what? :)

  4. analytik 16 days later:

    Ha, thanks for the upgrade! I wonder, what are the technical details of the upgrade?

  5. Sean Johnson 29 days later:

    @analytik BubbleTimer was hosted on a small Amazon EC2 instance running eerything (the database and Rails stack). Now it's hosted on a medium compute instance with the database split off running in Amazon's RDS.

    -Sean

  6. Laurastar 2 months later:

    IAN: "Speeded up or slowed down in relation to what?" Jeah thats right Ian.

  7. Me over 1 year later:

    Does it work?

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