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	159344381	134155668	16%
Discourse	OSX	201518444	168480703	16%
Ruby stack	Linux	151606058	114763947	24%
Ruby stack	Linux 64bit	156942471	118022171	25%
Ruby stack	OSX	169405779	129635012	23%
Ruby stack	Windows	193101521	136704171	29%
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.