With the time, the usage of Cheméo is growing, this is nice, but for the users to be happy, the speed of the system must stay the same or improve.
Early this year I have rewritten the backend storage of the data and the indexing system. The results speak from themselves.
On the graph, you can see the time it takes for the software to render a page for you, the end user. The page can either be a compound page like the chemical properties of Propanol but also the corresponding drawing, Excel or PDF export. The percent are in fact the percentiles, that is, if you follow the 95% line, you know that 95% of the pages are generated in less than this time.
What is very impressive is that even the 99% is nearly always below 100ms. 100ms is the "instant" reaction time. That is, it is the time for the user to have the feeling the system is reacting instantaneously (See study).
Of course, this is just at the "server" level, the generated page must then be sent over the wire to the end user. This can take way more time, especially if you are looking for chemical properties from India or South Africa. But the good thing is that the pages are also pretty small in size, with the chemical properties but no funny effects and scripts and thus can be correctly delivered even if you have a low quality bandwidth like in Kazakhstan or French Polynesia!
The last interesting point of the rewrite was that it can now be installed easily within the Intranet of a company. But this is more a business point of view.