Whoa - we're looking into this right now.  More shortly; thanks for letting us know.

okay...just had a quick meeting.

Here is the skinny: nothing is broken.  We are collecting data, and while we don't have all the data or details we'd like, it seems that our change last week to MySQL 5 has added performance overhead to FreshBooks (ie is making it run slower), on top of which, it's monday morning and there is heavy use of the service.

We know speed is the killer app.  From the meeting we have identified a couple projects and given them a priority.  Please bear with us.  It's very likely that things will largely resolve later today as the machines finish the nightly chores and heavy usage slows down (ie Monday morning goes away).  That said, we think the slowness you are encountering is unacceptable .  We actually upgraded our hardware last week to stay in front of slowness, and in fact our efforts have actually a negative effect.  So we're moving swiftly to plan B.

Please know that we are upset that you are encountering this; please stay tuned we are taking it seriously, but it will be a little while before we are able to implement the changes we want to make.

- mike

Thanks Mike, I was going to report that I can't login to my API with my time program, but it could be that the program has a short timeout, and so it's not able to login due to the slow speed of the server... at least I can hope that's what hte problem is..   Thanks for keeping us updated!

Hi Mike,

Is there any hint to when Plan B could be in effect? We are trying to limp through this, and this has become painfully slow to update anything on our account.

Good news...i have an update here.

We've just instituted a change to MySQL 5 that seems to be having a big impact.  Let us know how your account is running, but we've seen a massive impact on this end.  We're still planning to make a series of incremental changes, but the slowness is now at bay, in fact I think we are going to start to see some of the performance improvements we were looking to gain from upgrading our servers!

Thanks for your feedback, patience and understanding, and please let me know how things are for you now.

- mike

Yup - working great now - (Now that Toronto has closed) Looks like you guys back east are hogging all of the bandwith

vastly improved, thanks!

James

Awesome job Freshbooks guys!  Thanks for jumping on it as fast as you did.  The site is really smokin' now.  (I'm sorry for comparing it yesterday to Vista, my bad!)

Milo

Performance can be a funny thing to work on -- sometimes tiny changes result in big impacts. That can be good (like today), or not so good (like yesterday).

Anyway, we know how many folks depend on FreshBooks to run their businesses and we don't want any of you to have to put up with inadequate performance. We will be continuing to review site performance and get more improvements up over the next while.

Thanks for hanging in there, everyone!

I'm posting in this topic because I'm encountering the same issues as the last poster.
Under Ubuntu and Firefox, many functions like saving an invoice or creating a new client just go into an infinite loop and eventually firefox asks you to download menu.php.

It works well under Windows though.

I just tried disabling Firebug from Firefox and the problem still occurs.

I'm running Ubuntu 8.04.2 and Firefox 3.0.6