capt morgan opened this issue on Jul 26, 2002 ยท 8 posts
capt morgan posted Fri, 26 July 2002 at 1:12 PM
Why has this dropped from 30 to 15. When you have a Gallery like World Builder, where there are not many postings during the month, it can make the Gallery feel very empty. Yes I know there are other options to choose from when viewing, but its nice to see what new stuff has been posted during at least the last month. This may seem trivial, but its a pain to then have to use "most commented" or some other option to see if any posts have "vanished" into the archive.
Could this not be a user option, to choose from 15 or 30 days when viewing whats new?
bushi posted Sat, 27 July 2002 at 3:11 PM
I don't know if this can be done but I'll ask the admins about it. My understanding is that the 15 day "what's new" was set that way because of database server load.
tim posted Sun, 28 July 2002 at 10:15 PM Site Admin
We're trying to find a setting that doesn't kill the servers but still provides a reasonable amount of history. I've upped it to 20 days for now to see how that works. Tim
capt morgan posted Mon, 29 July 2002 at 1:49 AM
Thanks - that should be more acceptable.
ronknights posted Mon, 29 July 2002 at 8:07 AM
"What's new" in my book isn't 15-20 days in the past. It's the past day or so. Why not allow us to configure our own choice of "What's New?!"
bevchiron posted Mon, 29 July 2002 at 11:48 AM
Doesn't #3 answer that Ron??
"You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star...." (Nietzsche)
ShadowWind posted Mon, 29 July 2002 at 12:31 PM
To Tim,
It's probably not my place to say this, but having spent the last 3-4 years working with mySQL, I can tell you that the difference in the number of days displayed is not going to matter that much in the general scheme of things. Yes it helped when you went from infinite to 30 days because it significantly shortened the search parameter and it kept people from using it to go through every date back to whenever to get the 180,000 pics, but 30 to 15 is really not going to do much. I didn't even notice it was changed until someone said something. In fact, getting to my gallery page takes 5-10 seconds before it responds on DSL. Last night, comments took 10-15 seconds to post.
The problem is not the number of results in a read request, it's the number of joins, writes, table locks, etc, that run up the CPU usage to death and unfortunately, mySQL is one of the worst for these things. Being that it's open source is not a bad thing certainly, but it's well known for it's sluggish nature in large enterprise solutions. Short of going to Sybase or Oracle, there are some steps that can be taken usually to bring the load down. These steps often include creative solutions involving the use of other file formats (flat files) in conjunction with the database to solve some of these issues, not to mention heavy indexing and rearranging of the databases to try and avoid as much table joining as possible. Since I don't know what the format is or how you currently have it set up, I can't advise on exact specifics. All I know is what I see from the mySQL dumps that the system does when it has an error (a dangerous thing to shoot those out to console from a hacking point of view). I feel your pain, believe me. It's not easy to keep a large system like this running properly, but I strongly advise that instead of taking away features in an attempt to fix an issue, to find a new way around it.
My 2c as always...
Just trying to help...
ShadowWind (internet applications programmer by trade, artist by night)...
bloodsong posted Mon, 29 July 2002 at 8:12 PM
well.... what if you only go to galleries once a month? (what if you go there less? i mean, is there an archive setting too? okay, so i almost never get to go there any more :/ )