Over the past few months the Apache CMS has seen lots of new improvements, all under the general theme of making the system more performant.  Supporting very large sites like the Apache OpenOffice User Site with almost 10 GB of content has presented new challenges, met largely with the introduction of zfs clones for generating per-user server-side working copies, changing what was an O(N) rsync job to an O(1) operation.  We've also moved the update processing out-of-band to further cut down on the time it takes for the bookmarklet to produce a page, eliminating all O(N) algorithms from the process.

 More recent work focuses on the merge-based publication process, which for large changesets took a considerable amount of time to process.  That too has been recoded based on svnmucc and is now another O(1) operation- essentially a perfect copy of staging with a few adjustments for "external" paths.

Combine that with the activity around parallelizing the build system and you have a completely different performance profile compared to the way the system worked in 2011.  In short, if you haven't tried the CMS lately, and were a bit offput by the page rendering times or build speeds, have another look!

Next up: describing the work done around external build support, focusing first on maven based sites.