Epic: Blazingly Fast Workspace Starts 🚀

[svenefftinge]

Summary

We want to make a big step in regards to workspace start-up times.

• Epic: Interact with VS Code Browser during workspace load #8971
• Speed up image pulls using IPFS #8186
• [server] Monitor and optimize Workspace Start #8972
• Epic: Lazy pull workspace container images #8992
• [registry-facade] Manifest generation takes "a long time" #9006
• Epic: Improved Workspace Startup Times #9018

Context

We have a series of existing hypothesis and experiments that we believe will impact user-facing Gitpod performance for workspace starts. This epic is to implement these experiments, with the expectation of an increase in performance

Value

Improving the user experience, eliminating one of the most significant frictions that are currently associated with ephemeral workspaces.

Acceptance Criteria

• Implement a user-centric metric that represents the full workspace startup time
• Run 4 experiments with the objective to improve the workspace startup time metric.

Measurement

1. Decrease in P50 and P95 time to start a workspace, from a user perspective—which includes server and IDE times.
2. Increase in user sentiment about workspace performance time Epic: Low-friction dashboard form to collect feedback #7925
3. Optional measurements:
   1. Workspace / page refresh and restarts (user thrashing)
   2. Abandoned workspaces (workspaces started but not “used”)

Growth Area

N/A

Persona

All Gitpod users.

In Scope

Improving performance of workspace starts

Out of scope

Improving performance of other aspects of Gitpod (general performance) e.g. prebuilds

Complexities

• We do not have a metric defined for performance (from a user-facing standpoint)
• Potential “milestones” along workspace start
  • Workspace requested
  • Workspace provisioned
  • IDE loaded
  • IDE content interactive
  • IDE tasks loaded and shown

Press Release

N/A

[atduarte]

Closed in favour of smaller and more specific 🛹 epics.