Site performance

Yep definitely quicker response now. I have a very quick broadband connection (150mb/sec) and clicking on “latest” was taking 15 sec + to load earlier. It’s about 5 secs now.

I like this site, the open nature of dialogue gives me hope for the Middle East and the shite pub situation in Hedge End and Millbrook…

And you get all this from the site loading slowly?

That’s very deep, Barry.

On a go slow again this morning…very slow :slight_frown:

It’s blazing fast, at the moment, for me

Died a death in the Philippines for some reason cannot even see old posts on some threads Ie the Moriniho should apologise one

Ok, I’ve made a change to the number of topics that we show in Latest Topics.

Now 10 per page. it was 20 - it should give the homepage a lot less to do.

Small update. A number of changes have been made to address things.

First off, we noticed that the “Latest By” link was not doing any real paging. It’d load the entire thread, which on something like Optimus Trousers, which is replete with content, that was taking a long fucking time.

It has been disabled. It was never really required after the visit code went in, and while it probably suits the kind of threads that develop on Q+A sites, it’s no good for the sort of long-running threads we have here.

Now I don’t know how many people were using Latest By, but just a couple hitting big threads could have had big implications for other people using the site. Seems to be running loads faster now.

OK, well I’m going to see if I can turn trousers on again *.

* Double entendre police to the Site Performance thread please!

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.