Blacknight store now faster!

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A few people have told us that over the past while they've noticed the new store can be a bit slow at times. There are two parts to the current store, the part on blacknight.com that allows to you choose to build a package and the bit that handles domain registrations, account creation and the checkout process (the part where we take your money, which is very important).

Since the entire platform is virtualised we've got the ability to tweak access to the underlying hardware for each part of the platform.

Today we've done the following:

1) We've given store.blacknight.com more access to the Intel multi-core CPUs on the hardware nodes that it runs across.
2) We've given bm.blacknight.com access to all cores on the nodes that it runs across as the store makes xmlrpc calls to bm and bm processes around 20k tasks a day (domain lookups, billing customers, creating accounts, sending provisioning commands to the provisioning system, checking on transfers, registrations etc etc).
3) We've re-written both the vps and shared hosting shops so that they now cache the plans instead of hitting the XMLrpcd on each customer view. The shared hosting one is live and the VPS one will go live in the coming week.

The changes above should make your experience with us more pleasant and also cause less frustration. We can also re-look at the allocation of cores at a later date to better tweak both systems.