In the new design (release 51) the web-code has been completely re-developed with improved speed as a high priority. The changes result in substantially smaller web pages which load much faster. A single page now requires far fewer network connections to the web servers, which substantially improves performance for users distant from the web servers. This has been achieved through the adoption of standards compliant HTML, Javascript and CSS; a more streamlined use of the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) protocol to include additional content; the incorporation of shared memory caching using memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/); and optimized Apache web server settings to improve browser performance. To enable the project to prioritize improvements and measure their impact on speed, a system for continuous automated monitoring of the response speed of the Ensembl website from more than ten sites around the world was developed and deployed in early 2008.
