Throttling like displays ( Hypothetically, I mean, ...)

[hyperpape]

...I have a friend who is kinda vain and can't see where people have liked his posts anymore, because the profile only displays 100 results.

If you want a more "respectable" complaint, you also can't see anything you have liked after the first 100. That's a problem because I often use likes to remember posts that I want to come back to.

[daniel_the_smith]

I wonder if he's related to the guy I know that'd like to be able to sort the gratitude page by likes, or even better, by the post/like ratio...

[Joaz Banbeck]

In the settings page where that figure can be changed, there's a cryptic warning that there will be a 'slow down' if the number is set over 250. It does not say what, exactly, will slow down. I infer that it is the display of the posts that you have liked, or display of posts in which you have been liked. If so, that seems a reasonable tradeoff. If the whole board slows down, it is not.

I set the number to 200. Please post here if you see any negative effects.

[Joaz Banbeck]

A day or two has passed, and I see no negative effects. I'm going to push it to 300 and see what happens.

EDIT: Neither this particular function nor the board in general seems to have slowed down.

[xed_over]

In the settings page where that figure can be changed, there's a cryptic warning that there will be a 'slow down' if the number is set over 250.

so, I take it that you don't work with sql queries a lot then?

I can imagine that the query for calculating likes could be a very expensive query involving full table scans. And as the size of the database grows, you could potentially lockup the entire system.

for some time now (even before this thread) I've been noticing extreme slow downs, but it now seems to be getting even worse. It usually takes 10-15 seconds to load a page when I first click on a thread title (especially if there are a lot of posts in the thread). Unless you are watching the logs or monitoring the database with a profiler, there's really no way to know if what I'm experiencing is related to your changes or not -- but I would tend to prefer to heed the cryptic warnings, unless you really, really know what you're doing.

[emeraldemon]

i haven't noticed any slowdowns...

[ez4u]

I have thought that at times the server has indeed gotten slower recently. I could not say more than that at present as I have not tried to take note of when, what threads I was trying to load, etc. However, it is quite likely that I noticed at least some cases in the Malkovich threads because I load them frequently. They do tend to be long threads.

[Joaz Banbeck]

@Ez4u: Ok, I propose a blind test. Sometime during the month of September I'll set it back to 100 for a 48-hour period. At the end of the month, you tell me when it was.

[ez4u]

@Ez4u: Ok, I propose a blind test. Sometime during the month of September I'll set it back to 100 for a 48-hour period. At the end of the month, you tell me when it was.

That does not sound like any fun at all for me.

How about this instead, everyone:
1. Every time someone thinks things load too slowly we PM Joaz.
2. Joaz varies the setting and analyzes the complaints to see whether there is a pattern?
That sounds like way more fun from my side. What does everyone else think? ? ?

[xed_over]

@Ez4u: Ok, I propose a blind test. Sometime during the month of September I'll set it back to 100 for a 48-hour period. At the end of the month, you tell me when it was.

Wow, its extremely zippy this morning -- pages loading in milliseconds, instead of 10's of seconds. (just in case something was changed already)

[jts]

@Ez4u: Ok, I propose a blind test. Sometime during the month of September I'll set it back to 100 for a 48-hour period. At the end of the month, you tell me when it was.

Wow, its extremely zippy this morning -- pages loading in milliseconds, instead of 10's of seconds. (just in case something was changed already)

I notice no change. What browser do you use?

[xed_over]

I notice no change. What browser do you use?

Firefox/Mac mostly.

This is night and day different from 2 days ago -- a long thread page would take 15-20 seconds to load (I timed them) each time. Now the same threads load instantaneously (mere milliseconds).

I don't know what, if anything changed, but its much, much better now.

At first I half suspected our corporate network at work, but I got the same behavior on my home network. Besides, no other sites ever behaved the same as this site.

[Joaz Banbeck]

I haven't changed anything yet.

[jts]

I've been using Chrome on XP and have had blistering fast load times for as long as I can remember.

(Or at least I should say, the page loads immediately. Sometimes if there are 20+ diagrams, it takes them a while to load, but I assume that's not what you mean.)

[xed_over]

I haven't changed anything yet.

well, that's unfortunate. something clearly changed for me. there are so many links in the chain, so its really very difficult debug things like this. for all we know, maybe the L19 hosting company rebooted their sql server.