Technical release notes Q1 / 2025
Technical release notes highlight the development work done to make the FA Platform fast, secure, reliable, and adaptable.
Performance
Opening and saving transactions in FA Back
Why?
Opening the Transaction or Trade order window to view or edit transaction or order details, and saving transactions, are very common activities for FA Back users. We identified and eliminated two performance bottlenecks in this area.
Who is this for?
All users, and particularly FA Back users.
Details
The first bottleneck was caused by unnecessary loading of portfolios for the Portfolio field, even if the user doesn’t was not going to make a portfolio selection. For example, when opening an existing transaction that already has a portfolio selected. This was due to an oversight in the Q4 2024 release, which has now been corrected.
The second bottleneck relates to FIFO overrides. This rarely used feature allows users to change the order in which purchase lots are sold. The bottleneck was caused by bidirectional linking in FIFO overrides: if transaction A sells a purchase lot that was opened by transaction B, FA system linked the transactions both ways: transaction A had a link to transaction B, and vice versa. This bidirectional linking wasn't necessary, and managing it produced a significant overhead when saving transactions in portfolios with a large number of transactions, so we removed it.
Purchase lot calculation speed
Why?
FA Platform calculates purchase lots for a portfolio every time a portfolio is saved. Since this calculation is a key factor in the speed of saving transactions in FA, optimizing it is crucial for improving overall performance.
Who is this for?
All users who save transactions in FA Platform.
Details
Purchase lot calculation is a complex process that involves loading various data, performing calculations, and storing the results in the database. Depending on the scenario, this can take anywhere from ~100 milliseconds to over 10 seconds in extreme cases. Transactions with recent dates are typically processed quickly, while saving or updating older transactions in large portfolios tends to be slower.
In this release, we optimized the speed of these calculations, while leaving the loading and saving speed unchanged. In typical fast cases, this increases the speed only slightly (~20%). In the slower, more extreme cases, the performance improvement can be up to twice as fast, improving performance by up to 100%.
Improved performance for mass-loading market prices and FX rates via GraphQL
Why?
GraphQL APIs allows you to fetch a list of securities with their latest prices in a given currency. Now you can do this much faster than before.
Who is this for?
This improvement is for the users who fetch security price information via GraphQL.
Details
Loading hundreds or thousands of securities via GraphQL is quite fast. However, loading that many securities along with related information, such as the security’s latest market price, is significantly slower. By default, GraphQL APIs fetches related information with separate requests to the database, which can considerably increase the response time.
To address this, we introduced a new parameter, batchLoadLatestPrices in the securitiesByParameters endpoint. You can use this parameter to fetch the latest prices in a single batch request, which is more efficient.
We solved a similar issue with fetching FX rates via GraphQL in a different way: we introduced caching.
Security
We updated Keycloak, our centralized authentication and access management service, to the latest available version (26) as part of this release. Keeping up with Keycloak releases is an important routine activity that helps us keep the FA Platform secure. We also updated various libraries in some of our backend services. Keeping dependencies up-to-date helps us keep services fast and secure.