Printer-friendly version
Forums:
I've mentioned this before, but today I dropped in and it took about 30 seconds for Big Closet's front page to load for me. I have the options on the home page pared back, and it makes little difference. Going between pages here is almost as slow loading as the front page. As I understand it, Erin has up to date hardware and software for this site. Maybe you've got hackers.
FM has a good reason for slow responce times, What is happening here?
Mr. Ram
Sloth and other South American Xenarthotheria
It IS slow today. It's been taking a consistent 18 to 20 seconds to load on my fast connection, the usual is 12 to 14. I'm not sure what is going on. We got cruised by two search robots around noon and 2 pm, but they were pretty well behaved.
It has also been very busy today on the site, around 150 people per hour each looking at an average of 4 or 5 pages and some of the current pages are quite long. Also, we have two polls/surveys going right now and those are database hogs but really I don't think that's it.
Bob and I have each been experimenting with various updates and have not had much luck. Stay tuned and go get yourself a cup of hot cocoa, I am working on it. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Thanks for the quick reply
Thanks, I'm glad you're working in it.
Would blocking search robots help any? Or maybe there's an advantage to allowing them.
Mr. Ram
Robots and Zombies and Betas, Oh My
The search robots I allow are no worse than having two or three regular visitors, ones that do not obey the rules I treat as rippers. Google, Yahoo and Giant are the most frequent search engines and Google usually does it between 1 and 3 in the morning.
The problem is basically that this software, while it claims to be for multiuser, multiauthor websites just never figured on so many LONG stories. We've got over 2000 stories, over 2000 members and over 200 authors. And all the categories that make finding what one wants to read easier stress the database, too.
At anytime there are 30 to 140 users on the site, each making a couple of hundred calls on the database a minute. One page takes 30 to 90 DB calls. What I have to do is figure out how to cut down the number of DB calls and still provide the sort of organizational POW that we all want.
Bob has helped enormously with tuning the caching so that duplicate pages asked for close together in time are just passed the same page. That's where the very fast server with tons of RAM saves our bacon. :) We also compress the pages for browsers that can read compressed pages so that's quick, too.
One of the problems with Drupal is that somewhere there is a DB leak in the code so that as hours and hours pass, the DB accesses get more and more redundant and zombie DB calls proliferate. Those are DB calls that no one is waiting for. That's when Bob or I sneak in and restart the DB server to clear the old requests that have clogged the system.
We're both running Drupal 4.5.8. The current version is 4.7.x but that amounts to three very tough upgrades (4.6.0-2 and 4.6.3+ are incompatible with each other) and the system has so far failed to survive the first of those. Drupal 5.0 is in Beta and will probably be released early next month but it is TOTALLY incompatible with how the stories are currently stored on BC. So...
Since I'm going to have to convert the database MASSIVELY to upgrade to 5.0, anyway, I'm looking at other CMS software instead of Drupal.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Another solution
This loads a LOT quicker. Bookmark the |RSS| feed in the top menu, that and the |100 comments| feed will give you everything important that has changed recently. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
See, told you a comments RSS was a good idea. :-)
I have the main and comments feed in Google Reader; it's a very convenient way of seeing what's new that's immune to site slowness.
Except... ;-) and I don't know if you can do this, but if the comments feed could have, on each entry, something that indicates to what story it's a comment, and the name of the comment poster, that would be perfect. :-) I'd guess that might need a little hacking of the commentsrss feed code. :-(
Yeah
That would be good. Couple of problems with the page RSS also. I was supposed to get a big block of free time for Christmas but it came shipping post paid and I had to send it back. :)
hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Page changes
Did you change the page layout? I noticed I'm having to scroll from side to side now (on the home page anyway), it used to be the page fit my screen with no horizontal scrolling.
Hugs,
Karen J.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Side scrolling
I need more info. Have I changed the front page layout? Yes, frequently, almost daily. Should it have effected sideways scrolling, no.
What time period are you talking about? What's your monitor resolution? What's your browser? OS? Does the title of "In the line of duty..." appear on one line or two? Do you mean on the front page or just in this article? How about other articles?
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Okay, I found it
It was the {pre} commands in the synopsis of Julie O's story, they weren't letting the lines wrap and break like they should.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Hmmmm.
I didn't add any {pre} commands; any that were there were added by your software, I think. ... Although, come to think of it, that synopsis was copied and pasted from an email on Bob's Squirrel mail server. Would the {pre} commands have come from there?
Amelia
"Reading rots the mind." - Uncle Analdas
"Reading rots the mind." - Uncle Analdas
Hmmmm?
No idea. Pasting into Wysiwyg has unpredictable results.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
So...?
I usually wind up looking at the HTML page anyway. Is it a good idea to remove any {pre} tags I find? I *have* removed oodles of duplicate code on occasion.
Amelia
"Reading rots the mind." - Uncle Analdas
"Reading rots the mind." - Uncle Analdas
Probably
Those weren't particularly long lines but the CSS for the page also created a box around them with padding, so that and the unbreaking lines made them wide enough to cause a problem on narrower monitors.
I can fix the CSS (never saw what it did before) but still, the {pre} commands seem chancy.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Narrower Monitor?
For what it's worth, I'm using a 19" CRT at 1024x768 resolution, not what I'd call a "narrow" monitor display. (Display settings optimized for viewing Doppler WX Radar in the spring.)
Also IE6 & XP SP2
Karen J.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Do You Remember Eating Paste In the First Grade
Pasting can be sticky.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Paste eating kids
I remember those weird kids, it grossed me out, even as a six year old!
:D
Mr. Ram
When I was in 'baby' class ...
... as it was called back then in 1945, any paste was made of flour and water and so quite wholesome if not very palatable. Don't actually remember eating it, even though flour was probably on ration like just about everything else, and I'd be a starving mite LOL
Geoff