Workbench 25.0.1 Beta

[Ryan Brainard]

After a successful experiment to improve how Workbench handles long-running requests, I'm proud to announce that the first public beta of Workbench 25.0.1 is now available. This new version has already been running successfully on workbench.developerforce.com for a couple weeks now. This instance is running on the Heroku platform, so I was able to closely monitor the performance and deploy several iterations before cutting a public release. This model has worked very well, and future releases will likely follow a similar rollout -- that is, workbench.developerforce.com will always be on the latest release and then public releases will shortly follow after monitoring and any improvements have been made.

 This version includes:

• Brand new async framework for processing long-running requests in the background. This means when running either SOQL queries or Apex scripts, the page will return immediately with a "Loading..." indicator while the actual processing is queued up in the background for actual processing. When the results are available, they will be returned to the page. For most queries and scripts, you probably won't even notice a difference, but for long-running requests, it means no more timeouts or session lock ups. During the last few weeks while I have been monitoring the performance on workbench.developerforce.com, the page timeouts have virtually been eliminated and queue wait times reduced to almost zero. For the curious, the average execution time for the past week has been 4.8 seconds with a standard deviation of 61.3 seconds with a sample size of 31K executions, which means that while the average query or script runs relatively quick, there are quite a lot that would have blown the previous 30 second timeout causing frustration for the user and tying up valuable resources on the server. Now with the new framework, the page returns in an average of 0.4 seconds and the query or script can run to completion in the background without affecting the user or the service. 
• For administrators who run their own instance of Workbench, the framework is disabled by default, but can be enabled simply by configuring the redisUrl to a Redis instance, which supports the async communication, and running async_workers.sh in the background. Traffic to and from Redis is encrypted. A pre-configured Procfile is also included for running on  Heroku that allows you to scale to any number of background workers you wish. Multiple workers can even be run inside of one dyno by setting the MAX_WORKERS environment variable.
• Partial upgrade to API 26.0. Sign up for Winter '13 Pre-Release to try it.
• Support for signed request-based logins with the pilot Canvas Framework in Winter '13.
• Encryption of Salesforce session id in the PHP session.
• Set default timezone to UTF if not already set in php.ini.
  
• Improved error reporting and logging and various other bug fixes.

As always, the latest Workbench can be downloaded at https://code.google.com/p/forceworkbench/downloads/list or accessed at https://workbench.developerforce.com.

Thanks,

Ryan