Here at Lumar, our engineering team is always looking at new technologies to see how they can benefit our customers. One such improvement that we’re nearly ready to roll out, is moving our crawler to use Arm.
What is Arm?
Arm is a CPU architecture designed for cloud computing, machine learning, and high-performance computing. Arm CPUs are used in everything from phones to servers and embedded systems, due to their low power consumption and high performance.
Why the change?
We’re making the move to Arm for two key reasons. Firstly, Arm provides up to 60% greater energy efficiency, making the Lumar crawler a more environmentally friendly aspect of our platform. Secondly, as Arm is built on a performance-first CPU, it delivers maximum performance for compute- and memory-intensive applications. Faster CPUs are more reflective of the devices users are using, and may therefore improve metrics related to speed (i.e. our Site Speed metric or the Core Web Vitals metrics available in SEO projects). It also provides a more future-proof technology that allows us to continue delivering improvements to the Lumar platform in the future.
What is the impact for our projects?
As mentioned above, the move to Arm will mean crawls run on faster CPUs that are more reflective of devices used. You may, therefore, see some improvements to health scores once your account uses Arm. The only other difference will be to our Accessibility projects, as our Arm environment uses a slightly different color profile which may result in some subtle changes in metrics related to color contrast that shouldn't impact reporting. The migration will not impact any existing or running crawls. These will finalize as normal, with any subsequent crawls running on Arm.
When is the change going to happen?
We’re taking a phased approach to the rollout, so we can continue to monitor performance. We’ll notify you via in-app messaging when your account has been migrated to Arm.
What do I do if I notice issues after migration?
We do not anticipate any issues following the move over to Arm, but if anything does arise please contact support@lumar.io (or your Customer Success Manager if applicable) and our team will investigate straight away.