January

Month of fixing bugs and improving overall performance

Welcome to the first update of the year! Hope the New Year has been good for everyone so far, it certainly been great for yours truly. As mentioned in the last update, due to starting a new job, I was going to take it easy with Kenmei development this month.

As a result, I've mostly been concentrating on fixing bugs and improving performance, which has been neglected recently, due to a big focus on new features, like Kenmei V2 Dashboard. This update will be a bit short and possibly not as exciting to most, but here we go.

As always, you can find the full list of changes here:

📋Changelog

📊 Dashboard V2 Survey

Before I jump into the usual info on the last month, I wanted to mention the survey I've published the other day. You've most likely received an email from me already, asking for feedback, so I would really appreciate if you spare a minute to fill it out!

You can find it here: https://forms.gle/qgZDQpgecdTLqZGP6

❗ MangaDex Chapter Delays

I'd also like to mention the ongoing issues with MangaDex. I've mentioned it on Discord, but many people are still not aware → MangaDex has been experiencing a lot of issues recently, which results in Kenmei sometimes missing last chapter releases. This affects all the other apps, including Tachiyomi, so, unfortunately, it's out of my hands and up to MangaDex developers to fix. I apologize for the inconvenience.

The good news is that I still manually update all series at the end of the week. So even if some chapters got missed out, you will see them appear at the end of the week.

⚡ Performance Improvements

Unlike many other manga trackers and readers, I've always been very conscious of performance and stability of the site. That does results in slower development, but also much better experience for all, especially as we grow. But there has been some recent performance issues, that I've been meaning to fix, so this month has been a great opportunity to do just that.

One issue, especially since adding Webtoon, was a big hit on memory, which would not only make updates every 30 minutes slower but would also slow down the whole site. I've managed to fix the issue, as you can see in this graph:

As a result of this fix, it also affected the rest of the site performance, even more drastically. If you've noticed a slowdown in recent months, it should not be the case anymore. Check out these lovely graphs:

There is also what's called 95th and 99th percentile, which basically looks at the minority of users, those who are most active on the site. They have the slowest performance as a result, and in the past month, it got worse. While the biggest improvement was for the majority of users, recent improvements still gave a 30% speed increase for outliers as well:

🐛 Bugs fixes

Various small and big bug fixes have been made, you can find the whole list in the changelog. But the 2 biggest ones I've fixed, were the Read in X minutes, where it would incorrectly show something you've just read as if it was in the future! This has been fixed and now anything that you just read will be shown as Read just now

The other, nastier bug, has been series showing No Chapters Available when they do indeed have chapters available. That's been a regression, introduced with the new Deprecation System, where I mark series that have been removed so that I could notify everyone and help them switch to a different site.

This has been now fixed and they should now only be marked as such when I can confirm with 100% accuracy, that a link doesn't return any information anymore.

📈 Progress Overview

As mentioned, this month has been mostly focused on bugs and performance improvements. I've spent a bit of time on the covers mode and extension as well, but not a lot. In the coming months, I am focusing on dark theme, covers mode and extension. I am also working towards premium tiers, as a lot of requested features require funding, which I currently don't have.

Here the usual breakdown (take % with a grain of salt):

  1. Admin control panel → 10% Complete (required to add more aggregators)

  2. Dark theme → 10% Complete

  3. Official Kenmei Extension → 60% Complete

  4. New aggregator support → 70% Complete

  5. QoL improvements to the new UI post-launch → 20% Complete

Progress is slower as I've gotten busy with the new job, so I can't give any ETAs and % progress is not that accurate. As usual, I am working at my own pace and things will ship when they ship. I hope you can be patient, as I work on new features.

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