Higher Perf Forums - Beta Test

[Mike Fitzgerald]

Hi guys,

After a few sluggish days last week I started work on a higher
performance forums application.

While I very much appreciate the efforts to improve speed, the birth pangs of merging/changing, whatever, to the new system amounted to very much a "gotcha" in my case. This was in part because, purely by chance, there were other changes happening with my system almost concurrently.

In the end I wasted, literally, many hours head scratching needlessly. Had I been aware there were major changes afoot, I would have simply ridden it out, content that it wasn't all my personal problem. (And no, the message in green at the top of this edit screen gives little away — there's been a caveat about a related 2-minute (or so) delay for quite a while, and this message says nothing about the magnitude of the rehash.)

All because I didn't happen to pick up this thread in the News Forum. A message in the main News page — equivalent to the most welcome explanation about the congestion occasioned by the Wall Street article — would have gone a long way to set people's mind at rest, as would a more informative temporary message at the top of each forum.

Sorry if I sound ungrateful, but an announcement of that sort seems, to me, a fairly logical thing to have put in place.

Mike

 

[Mike Fitzgerald]

Sorry, but that isn't going to change. Our system supports
multiple sub-threading, something UBB can't do, this means that
many of our threads grow into very specific and individual
discussions 'beneath' the original posting. Clicking to read a
message and getting a 200 - 300 KB page of messages back isn't (a)
clever, (b) useful or (c) a good way to reduce bandwidth usage.

These forums are the most popular and heavily used of any site I
know, the reason is BECAUSE of the way they operate. I'm not going
to break that, the majority of users prefer this format.

I generally agree — the unique format here is very quick and efficient, and its Achilles' heel has only been the server/DB load during peak interest. Hopefully the new scheme will do much to get around that, giving a much better average overall.

One limitation, though, is that pertinent sub-threads aren't always easy to identify. The notion of changing the subject line is a good one (I know Zack Arias would be ready to take up arms in support of this , but I find it easy to forget to do it as often as I should, and I suspect others have similar problems.

Is it possible to have the edit screen come up with the subject line highlighted when the user hits Follow up (reply)? This would encourage people to at least think about changing it to something more appropriate when necessary. It would be harmless, since at the moment you have to mouse into the message area regardless, to get started.

Mike

 

[Phil Askey]

I apologize Mike, but the only way for us to KNOW if it was working was to put it under load. The few beta testers who tried it didn't account for 1% of the normal load on the forums system. I had to merge it without telling anyone so that I could slip the new and old systems in and out (to see the difference it was making).

I'll put a news article up today to be sure everyone is aware. Thanks for sticking with it (I've not slept much in the last few days).

Hi guys,

After a few sluggish days last week I started work on a higher
performance forums application.

While I very much appreciate the efforts to improve speed, the
birth pangs of merging/changing, whatever, to the new system
amounted to very much a "gotcha" in my case. This was in part
because, purely by chance, there were other changes happening with
my system almost concurrently.

In the end I wasted, literally, many hours head scratching
needlessly. Had I been aware there were major changes afoot, I
would have simply ridden it out, content that it wasn't all my
personal problem. (And no, the message in green at the top of this
edit screen gives little away — there's been a caveat about a
related 2-minute (or so) delay for quite a while, and this message
says nothing about the magnitude of the rehash.)

All because I didn't happen to pick up this thread in the News
Forum. A message in the main News page — equivalent to the most
welcome explanation about the congestion occasioned by the Wall
Street article — would have gone a long way to set people's mind at
rest, as would a more informative temporary message at the top of
each forum.

Sorry if I sound ungrateful, but an announcement of that sort
seems, to me, a fairly logical thing to have put in place.

Mike

 

[Mike Fitzgerald]

I apologize Mike, but the only way for us to KNOW if it was working
was to put it under load. The few beta testers who tried it didn't
account for 1% of the normal load on the forums system. I had to
merge it without telling anyone so that I could slip the new and
old systems in and out (to see the difference it was making).

Thanks for the explanation, Phil; although I don't see how a general "site maintenance in progress: do not adjust your set" assurance would have let the cat out of the bag. Never mind, performance is looking good (except as below), so on to better things...

There may still be a problem with refresh in certain situations. In the case, specifically, of a thread accessed via the "My Threads" route, I'm finding it impossible to refresh the list by any means other than clicking on an existing post. Neither Refresh nor Shift+Refresh has any effect (IE 6.0.2). This means that if a thread has only two posts — the originator's and my response — then there's no way I can verify via this route that my post was lodged. All posts show up correctly, however, if I go in via the relevant Forum rather than My Threads.

Clearing the cache has fixed it (so far), but note that my invisible post (that I've just finally exposed) was lodged at about 6 a.m. your time Friday. I don't know if you've changed anything since then, but it obviously didn't relate to anything in my cache older than that.

I'll put a news article up today to be sure everyone is aware.
Thanks for sticking with it (I've not slept much in the last few
days).

I know about loss of sleep... Anyone who's ruled by computers knows about loss of sleep ;-)

Mike

 

[Mike Fitzgerald]

Seems to have settled down now. Working fine in IE 6.
Thanks,
Mike

There may still be a problem with refresh in certain situations. In
the case, specifically, of a thread accessed via the "My Threads"
route, I'm finding it impossible to refresh the list by any means
other than clicking on an existing post. Neither Refresh nor
Shift+Refresh has any effect (IE 6.0.2). This means that if a
thread has only two posts — the originator's and my response — then
there's no way I can verify via this route that my post was lodged.
All posts show up correctly, however, if I go in via the relevant
Forum rather than My Threads.

 

[Frank C.]

Hya Phil, I have a problem with IE 5.5 in that when I click on
a post I can't see the rest of the thread structure ( headers )
at the bottom of the page anymore. I get to see the post
OK tho..... thx. Frank C

Hi guys,

After a few sluggish days last week I started work on a higher
performance forums application. It looks and feels EXACTLY the
same as the current pages but works in a very different way. Our
current forums are crippled by the fact that every message read
(read.asp) accesses the database (500,000 times a day), this puts
load on our database and web servers. The new system is simple
enough, make read.asp cacheable (ie. if you've read the message
before your browser won't ask for it again) but make the thread
list dynamic (as that can change by the minute). This new system
should be (a) faster for you as a user of the forums, (b) put less
stress on our servers and (c) help to reduce our huge bandwidth
usage.

If you feel like you'd like to help beta test the new pages they
can be found here:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums2/

Remember, it (should) look and feel almost identical to the
existing system but reading messages (especially multiple messages
in the same thread) SHOULD feel faster.

Caveats:

The new pages will work ONLY with Javascript enabled browsers
(IE4+, NS4+, Opera 5+) - this is non-negotiable.

There may be a few 'gotchas', make notes in this thread if you have
found a serious issue.

 

[Frank C.]

By the way, Netscape 4.77 works fine no glitches.
However IE5.5 is giving me problems. I
haven't changed anything in IE5.5 recently and other
users are reporting the same problem.

Cookies enabled
No Proxy
Ad filtering disabled

and still I get problems from IE5.5

thx. for any help.
Frank C.

Hya Phil, I have a problem with IE 5.5 in that when I click on
a post I can't see the rest of the thread structure ( headers )
at the bottom of the page anymore. I get to see the post
OK tho..... thx. Frank C