UMBRACO’s Latest Features

Umbraco makes it easier than ever to manage your content and content is key for any website because it allows you to connect with your visitors and boost engagement. And with the latest release of Umbraco 8.15, we’ve taken a look at its new features which will help you create an even greater connection with your audience.

Reduced footprint

Umbraco is now more faster. No less than 10 issues/fixes are performance-related and some of them are big changes and big improvements. It runs the gamut from optimising how content is loaded in the Blocklist editor with fewer database calls, to improving memory allocation, start-up time and cache optimisation. All these things combined reduce the resource footprint of Umbraco CMS.

Faster to boot 👢

A lot of work has been done to optimise booting Umbraco up and both cold and warm booting has been improved. The changes relate to everything from cleaning up the boot events and timing to populating the cache lazily.

Block List editor performance enhancements

A number of optimisations have been done for the Block List editor. This is mainly targeting performance in the back office, ie. reducing the number of database calls.

Frontend cache optimisations

Querying content from the front end caching layer has also been improved. These improvements will benefit all new projects based on 8.15+ (including Umbraco 9) but be aware that some of the new features are optional for projects upgrading from earlier versions. 

General improvements include optimisations to database indexes, more efficient SQL queries and adding string interning in a number of places to reduce memory allocation and speed up string comparison.

If you are upgrading to Umbraco 8.15 you can enable compression for serialised data by adding the following configuration key:

 <add key="Umbraco.Web.PublishedCache.NuCache.Serializer" value="MsgPack"/>

This change helps reduce the size of the data and thereby the memory allocated for the cache layer. This is enabled by default on all new Umbraco 8.15 installations but off by default when upgrading. If you want to ensure the “old way” of serializing data is used you can force it by adding:

<add key="Umbraco.Web.PublishedCache.NuCache.Serializer" value="JSON"/>

How much faster?

All of these improvements help make Umbraco faster by using less memory, fewer requests and storing data more efficiently. It can be hard to quantify the gains as they depend very much on the amount of content in a given site as well as the implementation. 

Another huge benefit is that aside from being faster and using less memory, performance is also more consistent which makes it easier to profile, evaluate and optimise your own implementation.

If you’d like to upgrade your website to a faster, slicker and more content friendly option get in touch now.