FortKnox's Journal: Did Somebody Say Lag?

Slashdot has crawled all week. I think its either the new features added, or loss of servers in a cost-cutting move by VA. Either way, its unreadable. I'm working on a J2EE/Struts website that'll be journals and fun entertainment stuff. If this lag keeps up much longer, I am gonna speed up the development and give something else for people to point their webbrowsers to (I'll put in a stream to slashdot, so you can at least read the headlines and stories of what's posted without the lag).

J2EE site

[glh]

I'd like to tie into your site once I get my "blog" going with RSS if you're going to do that. I'm playing around with one right now, I think that'll be kewl.

ObMeToo

[banky]

I've been working on the same thing... I even have ideas about the "journal clique" concept, but moved off-site, specifically between sites.

Yea, same here

[GMontag]

Really slow, there was a mod to one of my posts earlier this AM sometime and the message still has not arrived.

I am posting this immediately after seeing the message of your post in my browser.

Well

[sulli]

I asked [slashdot.org]...

Lag not so bad today

[glh]

Today Slashdot actually seems to be running somewhat decently (at least for me). I was reading Taco's journal and it sounds like he's done been doing a lot of "live testing".. ie, putting stuff up that doesn't necessarily "work". I really doubt the slashdot team does load testing before they put a change up.

If you think about it, it only makes sense to do what FK is talking about and a lot of people are going that route. With the way blogging technologies are moving today, I think we are moving toward a "distributed" slashdot. A circle of friendly blogs owned individually that ping back to the other blogs when there is an update. I think that would be much better, and it would also reduce a lot of the noise. I spend more time reading and writing in journals than comments now days. The conversation is much better, more personal, less likely to be trolled, etc. Anyway, that's just my 2cents. If anyone is interested in more of what I'm talking about regarding the future of blogging, check out this site [erablog.net]. Make sure to read about "trackback, pingback, trackforward, postforward and comeback" which are some really cool ideas that many bloggers are starting to implement.

Re:Lag not so bad today

[Safety Cap]

I really doubt that /team does any testing before they implement a change.

If they tried to pull a move like what they seem to have done within the past few weeks (unexplained oddities with the UI) at a professional shop, they'd have their IDEs handed to them as they were shown the door.

SQL

[cscx]

I've never dived too deep into Slashcode, but I can imagine that some pretty downright nasty SQL is required to generate the nested, etc threads. Look at fark [fark.com] for instance; they use perl + MySQL. It's lightning fast. There is a runtime counter at the bottom of the threads if you look -- it takes about 0.5 seconds to generate a forum thread with 300+ comments in it. That's cause it's all flat -- all you need is a SELECT STUFF1, STUFF2, ETC FROM COMMENTS WHERE DISCUSSION_ID = 12345; or something like that. I assume Slash's is horrific. I'm not a DBA or anything of the sort, but I'd imagine you would need one SQL query for each level of a discussion tree. For heavily nested comments I assume that would be quite a nasty load on the MySQL server... of which they only have one.

Oh well. I think Slashcode has become so complicated that it's grown out of control. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: fix what is broken before adding all this ridiculous unnecessary "features..."

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

CmdrTaco has a journal about it

[AltCmdrTaco]

but you probably can't comment there. Comment in my journal [slashdot.org] instead.