Upgrades improve CARTO platform performance by > 20%

Here at CARTO we are constantly updating our platform so that our customers gain in system performance, reliability and security.

One of the benefits of using our SaaS and On-premise offerings, is that we fully manage all updates on your behalf. In fact, we are continuously deploying new software versions and upgrading key components of the platform.

Using a managed service like ours not only reduces your overall system engineering costs, but with these continuous updates, you also benefit from a faster and more secure platform. In recent months, we have carried out several upgrades to the CARTO platform, including a move to PostGIS v3.0, PostgreSQL v12, Node.js v12 and Python v3.0. These upgrades provide our customers with the system connectivity, scalability and resilience they are looking for in an enterprise platform like ours.

Benchmark Performance Analysis

To demonstrate the real impact of these enhancements, our Engineering teams have carried out a series of benchmark studies.

When rendering a map in CARTO, user applications need to execute several requests to our Maps API. Map resolution and map type (Vector or Raster), can impact the number of API requests required, but typically a single mapload requires between 8 and 16 calls to the API. For our users, the faster this process is, the better.

To benchmark platform performance before and after core component upgrades, our technicians analysed the time taken to render a single map tile.

And our results are as follows:

• For map points, in this example trees in New York City, the time taken to render a tile with 17,000 points was reduced from 790 milliseconds to 640 milliseconds. A +18% performance gain.

• The time taken to render a tile with 95,000 lines on a map was reduced from 575 milliseconds to 425 milliseconds, a +26% performance gain.

• For 54,000 polygons on a map, in this case New York buildings, the time taken to render a single map tile was reduced from 720 milliseconds to 570 milliseconds, a +20% performance gain.

Unlocking performance improvements

As these results show, upgrades to the core components of our platform have a notable improvement on map rendering performance, not to mention the inherent improvements in system security.

These updates not only improve the CARTO user experience, but also guarantee seamless interoperability with high performance analytical technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks and Google BigQuery.

Likewise, satisfaction with CARTO performance is also reflected in the recent Location Intelligence Grid Report carried out by G2, where users gave CARTO an 89% satisfaction rating in the Performance and Reliability category.

These upgrades are automatically available to our SaaS users, “out of the box”. Our Enterprise “On premise” customers should contact their Customer Success Manager for more information on how to unlock these performance improvements.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 960401.