h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As one or two of you may have noticed, h2g2 (and DNA in general) has been a tad, well, slow in recent days. And a bit flaky.

Most of this is down to the speed of the database. Adding new features inevitably means making more requests to the database, and some requests run slower than others. I've spent most of this week staring at performance graphs and page after page of profiling information, to try to spot those areas where we're performing badly. But we seem to have got somewhere, finally. Our most recent patch went up just before 8pm tonight, and almost immediately the CPU usage dropped from close to 100% most of the time to more like 25%.

One of the biggest culprits was Search. That's always been a query that takes a long time, but looking at the profile output, it soon became clear that things would be going quite quickly, then there would be a patch of very long running queries, and in among those queries (some taking minutes to run) was usually one or two searches. So it seemed that Search was blocking other queries. Changing the query to not lock other tables should help with that.

It's often difficult to tell if these changes make a difference. Sometimes you'll apply a patch, things calm down a bit, but then just get busy again later. But this time, something has definitely made a difference. Let's see if it lasts.

Hip hip hooray!


Mikey

Down to 25% sounds promising. Was that at a fairly peak time or is that test yet to come?

I don't think it will make much difference to the problems digibox users are having logging in though it would probably have helped when everyone else was trying to migrate accounts and the system kept crashing part way through.

Hi Jim

I've had a few problems posting to conversations and editing my user space since SSO, but things appear to be much better today, *touches hairy wood*



Prideth

jim

Way to go Jim!!!

B.

"Was that at a fairly peak time or is that test yet to come?"

It was around 7-8pm, which is a fairly busy period - after about 6pm we tend to be very busy and it continues until after midnight.

"I don't think it will make much difference to the problems digibox users are having logging in"

Well no, but I prefer to work on the issues affecting *all* users first.

Just a little extremely technical technical feedback...




It's working... I dunno which gizmos or thigumigigs you tweaked Jim, but it certainly seems to have done the trick



Thank you oh mighty one

All hail Jim




**touches wood rapidly just in case **

The SSO problem may be affecting more than just digibox users: <./>T333559</.>

Here's the digibox solution, a possible analysis of the problem and Spelugx's test of a form eliminating the script statements: <./>T331840&skip=40</.>

I thought it was a crafty scheme on the part of the BBC to cut down on digiboxers and their strange vowel-less existences.



B

The BBC say that they are committed to reaching *all* platforms.

I thought it was BBC policy to only support IE? Did that change?

Tango

Come on T, beyond a joke!
Oet

It is no good complaining at Tango for being on pre-mod. Apparently he hasn't actually had posts removed in ages and the original offence was not even something for which most other people were put on pre-mod. The staff seem to be just refusing to take him off pre-mod for petty reasons of their own.

Evidence please.
Oetz

Evidence of which bit?

===

The <./>HouseRules</.> change every so often but most people on seem to be on pre-mod for a week or two and Tango has been on pre-mod for longer than that.

How many of Tango's posts have you actually seen failed? Last time I asked it seemed there were hardly any and possibly none since the pre-mod except for where someone went back and found an excuse to retrospectively yikes an older post which none of the many people previously reading the thread had thought bad. Tango would be the one to know the actual number of posts genuinely yikesed since pre-mod though. Again other people are taken off pre-mod if their posts are not being removed.

The offences for which the staff said they put Tango on pre-mod were spamming (in a particular thread where everyone else was spamming) and being slightly rude in telling the truth about some people and things (NB *not* swearing or anything else really bad or against the law). Note that neither of these would normally have qualified as a pre-moddable offence on their own judging by the way other people are treated.

===

If you meant evidence of BBC internet policy, the statements I'd seen were that they were only officially supporting IE (on a PC?). I don't have references at the moment though. While some individuals within the BBC may wish to support more platforms and there may even be a document saying that they should support all platforms, the evidence from their coding practice is that they are putting stuff in the HTML which is not compatible with cross-platform support (lots of javascript and flash).

The situation is not healthy for Tango or the wheelhouse.
Everytime I log onto tango he's in the brig.
I have tried to address Tango because he is the loser here.
If you wish to help Tango gather the evidence and nail 'em.
Not only will it help him it will give the site some integrity.
You'll benefit from the exercise.

One more thing. This site functions only because of the rules not despite them. Tango has to learn what I have already told him.
regards Oetz