When designing Vetastic, one of our design challenges was to make software that would be performant even on networks that were less than ideal. In our time managing veterinary clinics and networks we found that commonly the software that they were using demanded that they maintain expensive, fast, wired Ethernet networks in order to make the software fast enough. I’ll dig into why this happens below for those that might be interesting in the ‘under the hood’ details that create this problem. But clinics often have old wiring, older networking, physical building constraints, and very often wish that they could use WiFi and laptops that can move around or computers in locations where wires are hard to run. In the past, clinics simply had to choose between good wiring and fast networks or slow applications.
This issue is actually bigger than just wanting the software to be fast under imperfect real world conditions. Software that requires extremely high speed inside the clinic to be fast enough is impossible to even consider using over the Internet either hosted by a vendor or being used remotely by a remote or partner clinic. So making Vetastic screaming fast over even slow networks was crucial to Quixotic realizing the dream of a software package that could be deployed on premises by customers, or in the cloud as a service.