On January 7th (as discussed) we switched from our previous hosting service to Google Cloud Storage for databasing. We hoped for some advantages overall from what they offer, in addition to faster communication between our database and our active gameplay servers (which are hosted by Firebase, a company owned by Google).



The results have surpassed our expectations, and we wanted to share some of that with you via some technical postmortem.

Firstly, here’s average response time of all requests across the Roll20 platform:

The blue dotted line is the day before the upgrade (terrible, and notice the giant spike around peak time)– so slow the site was basically unusable. Then the grey dotted line is an average of the week before (passable). But that solid blue line? That’s the same time frame the day after the upgrade– as you can see it’s both steady and without the peaks previously seen.

So, what does that practically look like to you the player?

Here’s the top five most requested pages (Looking for Group Search, your campaigns and campaign detail pages, the forums) BEFORE the switch…

Now here’s the most requested pages AFTER the switch:

You’ll notice it is not all the same pages because of differences in requests, but the overall drop in time is certainly noticeable.

Overall we’re incredibly pleased with the move. We still have a few pieces of the Roll20 website that we haven’t moved over yet (including the Development Server and the Wiki), but we anticipate getting that wrapped up in the near future.

Sorry for the inconveniences caused by our previous hosting, and HAPPY GAMING going forth with this faster solution!