What’s New in Cells: Performance, Security, and UX Upgrades

While we’re working on Wire Cells, we’re also constantly upgrading Cells. Version 5 is coming soon, but in the meantime, here are some of the improvements we’ve been working on since our last major update (Version 4.4). We’ve upgraded the backend – with faster performance, better scalability, tighter security, smoother deployment, smarter metadata handling, and even some UX improvements. If you’ve been holding off on updating Cells, now might be the time!

Let’s jump into the updates:

Performance & Scalability Improvements

Keeping Pydio running smoothly at scale is a top priority. Recent updates have focused on optimizing database queries, improving large directory handling, and enhancing LDAP performance to ensure faster navigation and better responsiveness in enterprise environments.

• Improved Enterprise LDAP listings performance and fixed slow DB listings due to missing indexes, making user management and data access significantly faster in large-scale environments.

• Optimized handling of deep paths when loading parent nodes (required to compute permissions), reducing overhead for large datasets and improving navigation speed.

Security Enhancements

Security best practices are constantly evolving, and Pydio has introduced several key updates to harden the system against potential threats. These include upgrading core libraries, patching vulnerabilities, and refining access policies to improve overall security posture.

• Updated Go build version and Caddy server to address security vulnerabilities, ensuring better protection against evolving threats.

• Fixed security policy evaluation edge cases and patched a security issue in the PDFJS library, reinforcing compliance and data integrity.

Cloud & Cluster Deployments

Recent stability and efficiency improvements ensure smoother scaling for teams running Pydio in Kubernetes or multi-node clusters. These updates fix queue management, optimize job execution, and prevent redundant notifications in distributed environments.

• Fixed NATS JetStream persistent queue handling for clusters, preventing potential job execution failures in distributed environments.

• Enhanced Kubernetes (K8s) support and prevented notification duplication in multi-node clusters, ensuring smoother deployments and reducing unnecessary load.

Better API & Metadata Handling

Developers and admins relying on Pydio’s APIs will benefit from more flexible search options, better metadata management, and improved handling of edge cases. These updates enhance query efficiency and API reliability.

• Introduced a case-insensitive sorting option (name_ci) in the Tree API and added support for multiple PathPrefixes in Search API, improving query flexibility.

• Enhanced request handling for proxies that buffer request bodies (e.g., Azure WAF), reducing errors and improving file uploads in cloud environments.

User Experience & WebApp Enhancements

The WebApp experience has been fine-tuned with better search results, improved file uploads, and various UX refinements. These changes make navigating, managing files, and performing administrative tasks easier with fewer interruptions.

• Improved the mini-site search engine to return more than 30 results and fixed UX glitches in various admin panels, making navigation and management more intuitive.

• Enhanced file upload mechanisms with better retry handling, ensuring successful transfers even in less stable network conditions.

Stay Tuned!

Stay tuned to Pydio because our next big update, Version 5, is coming in Q2 with Fully revamped Kubernetes integration, new DB support, new views to improve collaboration and much, much more. 

And don’t forget to ask us about Wire Cells, which is also launching soon.