Site performance

I’ve pulled my trousers* down again.

Whilst Optimus trousers isn’t the problem, per se, the fact that Optimus trousers’ thread is now so long is exacerbating the performance problems we’re having. But the same is true of any long threads we have.

The performance of the site will still be poor on the home page until the Optimus trousers thread has made its way off the home page. So get posting and push it down the latest thread list, at which point things should speed up.

Papster is working on a couple of options to fix this and will tell me when I can pull my trousers up again *.

* Double entendre police to the Site Performance thread please!

Well the thread bumping certainly seems to have helped.

(Now if you had a proper DB that was properly indexed you could write proper SQL to get what you wanted much quicker…)

It’s got bugger all to do with size or indexing; just some curious design choices that we’ve exposed with the way we run this site.

Remember that this is basically an open source take on StackOverflow. At its heart, it is more a Q & A site than an actual discussion forum. I think the original devs never expected huge threads, which accounts for most of the slowness.

They’ve basically coded it so that it makes logical sense from a developer’s point of view, which is not always what you want when performance is your key goal.

An example. That Latest Topic page currently works by:-

  1. Loading the n most recent topics

  2. Loading all posts attached to those topics

  3. Loading all votes attached to those posts

Step by step, it makes utter sense, but there is a chasm between what we actually need and what we pull back. The only reason we’re pulling votes is to get an up/down count. That is one of the big reasons it pulls all the posts.

I’m working on replacing the main pages that show topics with alternatives that’ll load a ton faster. I’ve done this by considering only the fields we need to load that page. I would expect most performance problems to completely fall away at this point.

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Sorry Pap, was a little dig at Bletch there, not meant to cause offence…

So, from your description, does the up/down count only include votes from the Topics on the front page??

No offence detected, BBB. I was merely dumping my investigation somewhere.

The leaderboard vote count incorporates everything. I was just explaining that the code was going a really slow way about getting the counts that are visible on the home page.

And FYI Big Bitter Bob, Optimus trousers lives in another part of the cloud and stores his shit in MongoDB. He has no performance issues at all.

Once every 5 minutes papster unzips my trousers and sucks the latest stuff out of me.

papster’s forum stuff uses MS SQL Server and whoever wrote it needs to be shot.

Relational good.

NoSQL gooder.

Originally posted by @saintbletch

And FYI Big Bitter Bob, Optimus trousers lives in another part of the cloud and stores his shit in MongoDB. He has no performance issues at all.

Once every 5 minutes papster unzips my trousers and sucks the latest stuff out of me.

papster’s forum stuff uses MS SQL Server and whoever wrote it needs to be shot.

The SQL server engine or the code that pulls from the database or the database design itself?

Originally posted by saintbletch

Relational good.

NoSQL gooder.

Courses for horses! Swings and Roundabouts! 6 of one, half a dozen of the other!

The code that pulls from the database, bobster.

As papster described above, to display the home page (latest posts), the code grabs the latest n threads and then grabs all of the posts for all of those threads.

This is done just to display the list of threads where the posts inside the thread are not even visible.

This happens every time someone refreshes the home page. Add Optimus trousers’ mammoth ~300 page thread into that and the server is thrashing on every F5.

The reason seems to be down to a desire show summary stats next to the thread that come from the posts.

It’s either very poor design, or as papster suggested, we’re using the forum in a way that was not intended/envisaged.

Re: horses for courses…Yep. I was just yanking your tail.

I think we’re alright on site performance now. Back up to 20 topics on Latest Topics. Still flying like shit off a shovel. Optimus Trousers has been reactivated. Bletch, can we close this bastard?

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Not sure papster.

I think it might be a good thread to keep pulling back to the top if anyone has concerns about site performance, and wants to answer the “Is it just me?” question.

It’s usually slow for me…But then again, I live in Ohio. Slow is the norm.

Can’t get the “latest by…” to work.

We retired that, but the site should remember which page you’re on. It isn’t gone forever, just was causing issues. We’ll get onto that this week.

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I keep beating away, but I just can’t get a woody. Maybe the site needs a tesosterone injection? Maybe some pics of booblies. Hey! I’m just trying to be helpful!!

Night and day difference in performance for me this morning papster.

Good job, mate!

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If I may borrow a saying “like shit off of a hot shovel…”

Pap in “can do own job” shocker :slight_smile:

Cheers, bletch, although the reward is not stressing about it. It has been bugging me for weeks, could have put the kibosh on any serious growth.

I am fucking glad it’s sorted.

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My 'latest by" linky thingy doesn’t work. It’s greyed out. I blame you.

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Again Papster, the site is fantastic this morning, makes my work day so much better when I don’t have to wait ages for pages to load…

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I have been noticing an issue with thread load times. They seem to have been getting progressively worse for me. In my capacity as admin, I noticed that I was getting great performance. What’s the diff, yo?

Turns out that there was a check on every single post determining if someone has got enough votes to be able to vote themselves. We don’t really use the feature, so it’s completely redundant. I have turned the check off, and I’m getting great performance on loading again.

Good news for any HPB (high point bastards) in similar straits.