Upgrading to version 3

Hi Guys,

We have just got lightspeed version 3 and i was asked to evaluate if we can upgrade.  We are failly late in the development cycle and upgrading to v3 seems risky. Can you guarantee me that it is backwards compatable? 

Will I recieve any performance gains?

Thanks Again,

Josh

The short answer is: no, we cannot "guarantee" that it's backwards compatible.  In fact, we know our customers have found a couple of cases where it's not.

That said, we believe that it has a very high level of compatibility.  All of our LightSpeed 2.x tests also pass under LightSpeed 3.  And most of our customers have reported no issues.

So this has to be a risk management decision for you.  It will depend on how close you are to the end of the development cycle, how good your automated tests are, what the cost is of a failed upgrade effort, etc.

Not knowing those factors, it's hard to make a recommendation.  If time is tight and testing a new drop takes a long time, then it's probably too high a risk.  If you have some breathing space and your automated tests will quickly flag any problems so you can back out if it all goes wrong, it could be worth a try.

Re performance:

We have made a few performance improvements in LightSpeed 3, and our testing suggests that LightSpeed 3 performs slightly faster than LightSpeed 2 in some scenarios.  However, we would not expect to see a dramatic speedup in common use.  LightSpeed 3 has generally been about adding features rather than speeding up the core engine.  I'd say that performance is NOT a good reason to upgrade unless there is a specific scenario that's slow in LS2 that you think might be improved in LS3.