It’s only been three weeks since we first surpassed the number of users I could count on my fingers and toes. The feedback from our beta users has been incredibly helpful. Skyler, our support guy, will be highlighting what people are saying in an upcoming post. Today, I’d like to share some of our most recent progress:

Improving performance
Xobni’s performance has increased by leaps and bounds, especially on inboxes with extremely high levels of email activity. These mega inboxes can contain hundreds of thousands of messages and span over a decade. Needless to say, Xobni must do a lot of heavy lifting to operate in such environments.

Our highest priority has been to improve memory usage and profile loading times. Xobni now uses less than half the memory it did when we launched at TechCrunch40! This memory reduction was made possible by improving the overhead of low level data structures within the .NET framework and our own data storage architecture.

Profile loading times have been dramatically improved; we modified the code to utilize our in-memory indexes more intelligently. On the most prodigious of profiles, this decreased load times from several seconds to just a few milliseconds. Sweet!

How to obtain the update
One thing we prepared in advance of our private beta was an automatic update infrastructure. It allows us to instantly share our bug fixes and feature updates with you. No new downloads required – Xobni will be updated the next time you start Outlook. So if you’re one of our private beta testers, last night we shipped you an update that’s the fastest and most stable version of Xobni Insight to date. You should notice the improvements immediately.

Don’t take our word for it
Eric Hahn, who knows what he is doing when it comes to email, made this comment on a blog of a user that cited a few of our early performance issues.

“Xobni is indeed a really cool tool. They have made MAJOR strides in performance - you should ask them for their newest build. It appears (to me) to be 5x-10x faster and no longer slows down Outlook at all. I’ve been running it for almost 2 weeks and it is really wonderful stuff. Hope this helps! -Eric”

Other new developments
Bryan is our web guru and designer. He’s been making updates to our internet-facing infrastructure, like adding additional servers and support for memcached, so that we can better handle future stages of Xobni’s growth. He recently set up Xobni’s team blogs system so each member of the team can share what they are working on and shine in their own way. Adam already has a Xobni blog set up here and Bryan now has one too. Look for more team blogs soon.

Aamir recently joined us, and has gotten up to speed quickly. He has already made contact details, names, and pictures editable in Xobni person profiles — one of our most requested features. This will give you much more control over the user profiles you see in Xobni. We hope to get it to you in the next few weeks.

We are always looking for new rockstars like Aamir, so check our jobs page to learn how you can join the team.