TL;DR
All repositories on packagecloud are now backed by the Fastly CDN for super fast download speeds!
In addition, we’ve completely redesigned search to make it faster and easier to use, added an indexing badge to repository pages, and dramatically improved the performance of our RPM indexers.
Let us know what you think!
Fastly CDN
We’ve added several new features and performance improvements across the board to help make your experience better!
First and foremost, we’ve rolled out support for the amazing Fastly CDN across all APT, YUM, Python, and RubyGem repositories, greatly increasing download speeds.
Fastly is generously providing free bandwidth for all open source repositories on packagecloud.
Redesigned search
Our previous search implementation was completely removed and replaced with a much faster and easier to use search. As a nice side effect, page load time for extremely large repositories was greatly reduced.
Our new search system allows user to search by filename, package type, and distribution.
Entering a simple query on the repository page will take you to a results page with a more advanced search for narrowing results.
For example, let’s say you want to find the version ‘2.1.2’ RPMs for the popular open source project runit.
On the runit repository page you might search for ‘2.1.2’ in the search box on the top right:
And you’ll be taken to the results page, with your query highlighted and useful options for adjusting your query to narrow your results:
We hope you will enjoy our new search system and that it will help you quickly and easily locate packages in large repositories.
New API attribute and package badges
We’ve added a new API attribute to most of the package APIs called indexed. This attribute is false until a package has been reindexed and is part of the repository metadata.
The website has also been updated to display a badge for packages which have not yet been indexed on the repository page under the package description:
And also on the package page, under the description:
When a package has been reindexed, this badge disappears.
Indexer and repository performance improvements
We’ve also made several changes throughout our code base to optimize our package indexers and our package servers.
Our RPM package indexer now indexes up to 80% faster for repositories with an extremely large number of packages. Repositories with a smaller number of packages (less than 2,000) reindex faster as well, but are less noticeable due to the nature of the optimizations we’ve made.
We will be releasing a similar set of optimizations for our Debian package indexer in the coming days.
Requests for packages via apt-get, yum install, gem install, and pip install are, on average, 50-60% faster:
Conclusion
We’ve increased the performance and usability of packagecloud on several features based on user feedback.
We’d love to hear what you think of these improvements or if there are other improvements you’d like to see. Feel free to email us and let us know.
