Enhancing Performance of Change History Logs in CRM

[jsmith123]

I’m a completely new developer so forgive me for asking something weird but any help would be appreciated.

 

I’ve been assigned a feature enhancement task for an application. 

 

The application is a CRM type application built using Core PHP / Phalcon Framework... the DB is on MySQL... it's a fully running application and needs some enhancements to existing features.

 

The CRM has a list of Contacts. Any user of the CRM who updates the profile of a contact, the system writes the change to it log.

 

There is a button called “History” when the user clicks on it, it shows the list of all changes that have been made to that particular contact… along with a couple of other information - like a revision history.

 

The changes are maintained and displayed from a few different tables in the DB.

 

The system is currently showing the changes but in plain text format.

 

Now the main requirement is to enhance this feature and make it look like a Facebook Timeline and also make sure that the page load times are much faster and retrieving the history of changes does not take a lot of time and does not affect performance of the CRM.

 

 

What should one do in such cases? What are the different ways to render information from different tables without affecting the performance.

[requinix]

One thing at a time, and fixing the page to render faster is more important than the timeline.

 

First thing is to find out why it's slow. Can you do that? It'll either be in the database (running a query takes a long time) or in the code (running many queries and/or using a lot of logic that simply takes time).

 

Starting in the database, you can find what queries are being run by the code and try them yourself manually. If you find a slow one then you can start digging into why and how you can speed it up.