Community Managers

The Gerrit Community Managers for 2019 were announced:

  • Edwin Kempin (Google)
  • Marco Miller (Ericsson)
  • Matthias Sohn (SAP)

See the linked post for details.

User Summits and Hackathons in Sweden and USA

The schedules are finalized for the user summits in Gothenburg and Sunnyvale.

Work on Gerrit Performance

In 2019, one of the major efforts we are working on is performance. Gerrit’s new UI has support for client-side monitoring through plugins which is great for measuring exactly what the user experiences. We use these client side metrics and apply the RAIL model to provide targets for latency. The current focus is on read latency - that is browsing around on the Gerrit web UI and looking at changes, diffs and dashboards. Write latency - that is posting a code review, creating draft comments, … - will follow once reads are acceptably fast.

This is an effort that goes all across the stack, it covers the UI, Gerrit’s backend as well as storage formats of data on disk where necessary.

Until now we picked a lot of low hanging fruits that speed things up notably. For example: Rendering Polymer components lazyly instead of all-at-once when the app starts up; sending index queries in parallel if the index backend supports that; inline data that is required when the app starts into index.html to spare extra requests; rendering the correct avatar sizes by default to spare extra round trips to the backend.

In the upcoming months, we want to fine-tune caching, work on external IDs and have the UI send requests to the backend earlier to allow for longer processing without latency impact.