Has anyone else been noticing that your recent posts are getting updated something on the order of once an hour?
That if you post in a new thread, it sometimes doesn't show up immediately?
That if you view a thread you've posted in, the recent indicator doesn't change?
Patrick, can you talk to your developer about this? It's ok if we move to a database model where writes only go in once every 2-3 minutes, but if updates happen once an hour, that makes the site confusing to use.
Yea, I noticed
Same thing has been happening to me.
The mobile site has been having some major issues with the message feature too. Sometimes I have like 600 messages, then refresh and it goes to 0.
Same thing happened to me there too.
mobile should be fixed now
fyi @BTbanker
sorry about that guys...we've been struggling the last few weeks to get our load down and this was an attempted solution.
I just dropped the caching on the My recent posts (http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/tracker/user) view to 5 minutes, so hopefully that makes things less confusing.
Will also get the mobiel site fixed...we updated the menu module and that messed up our mobile menus (I noticed on Firday as well)...hopefully by end of day Monday we have that fixed.
Thanks for the patience...we're also in the process of improving the UI and ease of posting new forum topics and other forms which are a bit ugly / cumbersome right now.
Thanks, Patrick
Have you guys considered a move to distributed databases/cloud databases to get loads down? Or are you still running everything off of one SQL server?
Also, I am going to keep quietly suggesting a move from the proprietary forum infrastructure to VBulletin. You guys are reinventing the wheel here, which I know you have really good reasons for, but some very large and successful sites run off of VB. This is the same principal behind using SQL for a database system rather than developing something proprietary- or developing the forums in Python rather than C; it's tried, it's tested, you can get advice from other people on it who've faced tougher problems. Your developer is going to resist this idea a little bit, but if you can get him into an open-minded state, he'll realize it's going to make his life easier in six months.
You are right that the primary load on the site comes from logged in users and displaying unique user content to each logged in user, however, it is also not something we can work around with some smarter caching. I am also not convinced that the caching over at vbulletin is any more sophisticated or would lower the required server power to host the community.
Our load over last 2 days is now down ~40% (compared to normal Sat+Sunday) since we turned back mysql caching, so that was the main issue. It was turned off several week ago because was causing outages during high peak times with newsletters, so we'll see if that is still an issue this week. Using New Relic, we were able to identify some bottlenecks and clear those out, so that has also helped...
Even if load is way down this next week and we can handle the load with newsletters, etc, we still want to be proactive and improve speed so we'll be investing there over the next few months. This may involve getting a pro account with new relic to be able to dig into the hooks, modules and views that are tying up the most cpu, and it may involve splitting to 3 servers, a web, a master db and a slave db -- but that is a much more expensive option, so would prefer to improve the software side and smart caching first and then see where we are. Throwing more hardware at the problem is rarely a good long term solution.
I hear you on vBulletin, but I don't necessarily think the transition would be as easy as you think since Drupal has a completely integrated system including user profiles, pms, userpoints (bananas), forums, groups, tracker, etc...porting this information over to vbulletin would be no easy task. I'm sure they have many things out of the box that may work better, but I don't like being stuck in their system...Drupal may be harder to handle out of the box, but it is also extremely flexible. Just a few examples...Not sure if possible, but can vbulletin have the "in reply to" tabs the float down, the WSO designed icons, the @mention feature, automated PMs when certain things happen?
For example, in the last 6-9 months, we've been able to add some cool new features that we found over at http://www.discourse.org/ - I think they are way ahead of vbulletin in terms of UI and ease of use - and there is no reason why we can't keep improving our forum layout, speed and UI as well.
I'm sure with some extensions all of that stuff is possible on vbulletin, but the amount of time and money we'd need to invest to get all the data ported, all the modules replaced and an entire new forum system on WSO working would likely turn into an absolute nightmare.
I may not be very technical, but from my 8 years running WSO, I do know to expect 3-5x the initial time and costs of any development initiative...in theory things are easy, in practice a lot of shit breaks, even when you have smart people working for you (especially on a site like WSO that has over 100 modules and is fairly integrated and complex).
have you, or anyone else noticed a big improvement in speed in last ~24hrs?
That is because we finally found the primary bottleneck which was the keyword link module. We need this module in order to have:
We think we have a solution to bring that functionality back and make it much lighter. Just wanted to give you and everyone else an update -- looks like for now there is no need to go to 5 servers.
Thanks, Patrick
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