Last night, we upgraded the journal websites to Topaz 0.9 rc1 (rc1 because this is a “beta” 0.9 release). The development for this release focused on performance and stability - specifically to alleviate the sluggish speed of the websites and the pain of ingests.

The development included a major re-architecture of the publishing application and weeks of performance testing. There are a few minor issues but the sites are quite zippy and the new ingest times have, to quote James "exceeded expectations." We’ll probably have a few more quick restarts over the next few days as we shift through the logs/bugs but we won’t have to rebuild the article cache ever again (another pain point).

Thanks to Russ for the heroic migration day, Josh for the speedy drive rebuilds of the Mulgara server last night, and to the Topaz/PLoS developers that got this "beta" release out the door. We still have some cleanup after the dust settles, but I feel confident that the site performance/stability has greatly improved.