WebGUI 8 is going to be the fastest version of WebGUI ever released. We're only a few days into the development of WebGUI 8 (way more ahead of us than behind us), and already we've seen some massive improvements.

The new caching system in WebGUI 8 gives us a measurable performance increase of 400%. That means that the raw speed of the new cache layer is 400% faster than the raw speed of the old cache. But there are other intangibles, like the fact that the cache is no longer database backed. This means that all those queries that were going to the database aren't anymore, which frees up more disk IO and database query cache to perform other queries more quickly.

In addition, hot sessions will reduce on average, two reads from the database and one write to the database on every page view. And this is increased even more if you are serving CSS and javascript out of snippets, or privilege protected images, etc. 

After implementing just the above two changes WebGUI already feels quite a bit snappier. And we've only just begun. Right now we're working on replacing WebGUI's underlying database with a whole new one, which by all indications is about 300% faster under load than the current database. 

As you can see just the basic stuff we've started on is going to make WebGUI 8 much faster than all it's predecessors, but that's not even close to all we're doing. Those 3 things only represent 2 line items out of 28 in the WebGUI 8 todo list. WebGUI's future has never looked so bright.