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Faster workspace startup times

July 31, 2021

Faster workspace startup times

A key metric we deeply care about at Gitpod (and Iโ€™m sure you do, too) is workspace startup time. In a world where you create and dispose of workspaces many times per day, the last thing you want is waiting for a workspace to start ๐ŸŒ.

In this release, we made significant progress in lowering startup times ๐ŸŽ. What initially may sound like complex changes turned out to be a +4 -4 pull request (#4847). Yay simplicity!

To give you an idea of the magnitute of improvement weโ€™re talking about, hereโ€™s a before / after comparison with 30 workspaces started twice:

Before Now
Plotted graph of workspace startup times ranging between 20s and 60s Plotted graph of workspace startup times ranging between 5s and 20s

Did you pay close attention to the y-axis? From between 20 to 60 seconds down to 5 to 20 seconds!

Great work team, letโ€™s shift our focus to other features. These improvements are certainly worth celebrating ๐ŸŽ‚, but weโ€™re hungry to drop these times by at least the same magnitude once or twice more! Team, finish your cake and get back to work ๐Ÿ˜‰.

Please do let us know if you notice any differences with your project startup times. You can find us at www.gitpod.io/chat.

Fixes and improvements

  • #4844 - Provide better feedback when gitpod.yml is invalid
  • #4816 - [gp] env: handle multi-word values without quotes
  • #4813 - [server] Handle releases/tag/in GitHub context parser
  • #4743 - [code] confirm sharing
  • #4738 - [code] serve each webview from own origin
  • #4734 - [#4699] Handle error situations around /headless-logs endpoint
  • #4115 - [server] store separate email used for commits (GitHub and GitLab). Thanks to @philschatz.

Gitpod Self-Hosted

We released 0.10.0 and updated the documentation to match. Head over to the docs for getting started.

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