Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Faster, Leaner BitNami Stacks

Tens of thousands of people come to BitNami daily to download and launch their favorite applications and development environments. Our stacks include all the software required to work out of the box. This is convenient, but also means that stacks are bigger (our servers routinely deliver Terabytes of data) and take longer to install.  We are continuously investigating how to optimize and improve our stacks. We recently released Ruby-based stacks with important performance enhancements and today we want to announce that we have significantly improved the size and installation time of all of the BitNami stacks:

- Download size has been reduced up to 25%
- Installation time has been reduced up to 20%

The table below provides some examples demonstrating the improvements for specific stacks:

Honey, I shrunk BitNami!

BitNami Stack Platform Old Size (Bytes) New Size (Bytes) Reduced size (%)
Discourse Linux 154093361 130738191 15%
Discourse Linux 64bit 159344381134155668 16%
Discourse OSX 201518444168480703 16%
Ruby stack Linux 151606058 114763947 24%
Ruby stack Linux 64bit 156942471 118022171 25%
Ruby stack OSX  16940577912963501223%
Ruby stack Windows 19310152113670417129%
Jenkins Linux 191424884 143244029 25%
Jenkins Linux-x86_64 187323355 140998975 25%
Jenkins OSX  192062870 144819619 25%
Jenkins Windows 211078764 145728200 31%

The table below shows the improvement in unpacking files time for different released stacks:

BitNami Stack Platform Old Time (secs) New Time (secs) Time reduction (%)
Discourse Linux 86.26 72.49 16%
Ruby stack Linux 86.17 69.62 19%
Ruby stack Windows 92.92 70.33 24%
Jenkins Linux 45.00 38.84 14%
Jenkins Windows 55.37 44.08 20%

Over the next few weeks we will update all stacks to include the speed and size improvements. Some of the stacks that already include these optimizations are Redmine, Discourse, GitLab, Ruby stack, LAMP, MAMP, WAMP among others.