What upgrade routine does to the GUI performance?

I have just smoothly upgraded to 2.6 CE. While the changes to the software are not so obvious what pleasantly draws attention is that after the upgrade the web GUI of pfSense became so snappy and responsive. You make a change to a firewall rule, save and boom you momentarily see the green ‘Apply Changes’ button. I think most people will concur that over time web interface becomes slow and you need to sit and wait until pfSense chews the change you made so you can save.

Question to Lawrence team: Do you know what happens to the webserver in pfSense when we run an upgrade? Anything we can do manually to ‘clean’ the webserver to make it fast again in between the upgrades?

Thanks

The faster UI is a result of changes made between versions that enhanced the system.

@Ascar are you saying that you noticed this speedup only with the 2.6 upgrade, or with every upgrade?

If it is every upgrade, I have an experiment for you to try: when a router has become noticeably slow, reboot it and see if that speeds up the webserver again. Or, SSH to it and restart the webserver process (I don’t know how exactly to best do this with PFSense but it shouldn’t be hard to find the command for it). You could wait to do this until you have a maintenance window, such as for the next upgrade. Because you do reboot the router once right before upgrading, right? So just observe the performance of the webserver between the reboot and the upgrade.

@brwainer I think I did not notice such increase in GUI responsiveness before after, only upgrading to 2.6 made this impression.
Things like rebooting or restarting the webconfigurator never helped before - if PF became slow then it will continue be slow. I searched in the past and found numerous discussions where people were complaining about very, very slow webGUI. Perhaps Netgate made a quality leap with 2.6?

Do you mean changes to pfSense between versions 2.5.2 and 2.6?