Updates on recent performance concerns

It’s been a tough week here at Knack for performance and we wanted to reach out to add further insight into what’s been happening.

Many of you have been affected by performance issues, where your app either hasn't been reachable, or it's been too slow to use. First of all, we recognize that these types of issues are unacceptable. They prevent many of you from effectively using your app, and we know how critical Knack has become in your work and lives. For that we sincerely apologize.

Our engineers have been deeply focused on resolving these issues. While we’ve been able to stabilize performance, we’re still working on isolating the exact cause of the issues. In a system with so many interconnecting pieces, this can be more difficult than it may sound. We’ll be manually intervening to keep performance stable until we can finally resolve this, but unfortunately we’ll still likely see some isolated latency until we can completely resolve this.

We’re still hesitant to draw final conclusions, but it’s clear that these issues originated after we released some work intended to improve performance and stability. We tested these changes thoroughly and nothing in our development or testing environments indicated that there would be any performance related issues. Our commitment is to rethink our deployment process in order to prevent these types of issues in the future. This means expanding the scale we apply in our tests, additional stress testing that can expose edge cases, and more simulation that can better approximate real-world usage.

The good news is that this work ultimately reflects a huge investment and commitment we’ve made in overall performance improvements, both in our hiring and internal focus. Those improvements won't always happen on a straight line of success, but we clearly need to do better on mitigating the downside of any changes.

Again, I want to offer our sincere apologies for any disruption this caused. Please know that we hear you, we deeply value your concerns, and we’re doing everything in our power to both resolve these issues as quickly as we can and ensure that they never happen again. Our commitment remains to learn from every experience, good or bad, and to improve the value that Knack can provide you. We appreciate your support and look forward to continuing to earn your trust.

Please continue to follow our status page for updates and don't hesitate to reach out to support for any continued questions.

-Brandon Griggs
CEO & Co-founder, Knack