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Users of Launchpad Answers will see that asking a question, editing it, or posting a comment to it is faster. Email about question changes is sent a few minutes latter. Many bugs relating to question emails were fixed as we moved the work of sending emails to the new process.

Users and answer contacts saw slow pages or time out errors when working with questions in large projects. Simple actions like asking a question or providing an answer would fail. It was common to see errors converting bugs into questions. A few weeks ago, we saw that 8 of the top 10 kinds of time outs involved questions; though this ratio was caused in part by the tremendous work of making other parts of Launchpad faster.

The root cause of the slow question pages was sending email to all the subscribers before showing the next page. The solution was to queue the the event to notify subscribers, and send the emails later. While updating the code, there were many opportunities to fix related Answers bugs. I am particularly pleased with the changes to the rules to create a question. There were four lines of code, and while I intended to fix one line, I realised there was a bug related to each line of code. In a matter of minutes I had fixed four bugs. The most obvious change you will see is that question emails will now state that you received the email because you asked the question, where previously you were merely described as a subscriber.