« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

A RedState 3.0 technical geek thread

(Formerly) a test diary to see if it works...

By: Bill S (Diary)  |  July 13th, 2008 at 05:28 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Well, I’ve made several comments yesterday and today, and virtually none of them have shown up, at least that I can see. I don’t know if it’s just the site startup woes, or if it’s FF 3, or what. But it doesn’t seem to be working right.

I’ll try this diary and see if I can see it. If not, well, I don’t know what to do.

UPDATE: I added this diary as a test to see if it would post correctly. But it seems to have morphed into an informal discussion of the ins and outs of the technical aspects of RS3. If you choose to comment on this discussion, please keep it constructive and not make it a big gripe-fest about flaws in the site. I am trying myself to not be a whiner. I know it doesn’t help. As an I/T architect, I am fascinated by the underpinnings of the site and the issues that are being encountered. High volume websites have interesting requirements and problems.

Tags: , , ,

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES  |  LOGIN TO COMMENT  |  REGISTER TODAY
  • Flagstaff

    Comments are way, way down.

    Two things might help you, but not much.

    First, the “Recent Posts” Tracker at the top of the page will post the latest comments in reverse chronological order, although it doesn’t seem to be working right now.

    Second, you can use the “Search” function, searching for something in your comments. My name works for me, but I suspect that a search for “bs” is going to find every comment with words like abs, absent, absentee, observe, etc.

    However, even if your latest comment is found in that search, it may not yet be posted when you link to it, and therefore all you get is the diary you posted to.

  • Neil_Stevens

    It can take up to two minutes for a comment to appear.

    Over time we may reduce that, but we’re doing what we can to keep the site running.

    So please, don’t even think we’re trying to keep people from commenting, heh. We’re trying to keep the site up at all so that commenting is even possible!

  • bs

    as it is the updates to the Recent Posts, Recent Activity, Recent Comments, and User Diaries lists. They seem to be updated (or not) randomly or not at all. As I posted elsewhere, the caching seems to be profoundly broken. One page will show one “version” of these lists, and on another page, another version, etc. There is no consistency and there is no apparent pattern to the “brokenness”.

  • Flagstaff

    It was taking almost ten minutes, maybe longer, earlier this afternoon.

    I understand about capacity problems, too. My first big batch implementation I overlooked processing time while testing. My test ran in minutes. Nationwide, it took the entire night. We re-launched the next month.

    Not that I’m suggesting you overlooked anything. But I did.

    Comments are posting almost immediately now. Coincidence, or did you tweak some options?

    (You can’t kid me. You were just looking for a way to keep he Rooster quiet.)

  • Neil_Stevens

    Each page is cached separately.

    There is no single uniform central cache of the side boxes and things. Every page you view gets its own cache.

  • bs

    but my problems seem to be minimized if I select “View my comment” after adding a comment to the thread. Something in that particular logic path seems to refresh things more effectively. Perhaps it also has to do with the apparent shortening of the posting time.

    Of course this IS Sunday night, and things tend to be a bit sloooow. Tomorrow will be the killer.

  • bs

    It makes those particular page snippets entirely useless if there’s no consistency between them across pages. There needs to be a refresh mechanism to force them to update. If I’m on diary A and the “Recent comments” list reflects a status from a day ago, then you might as well not even display the thing. There needs to be one single accurate depiction of the actual status of recent comments. As of now, I see none.

  • Flagstaff

    for me. If I didn’t get the 500 Error, it might just not be there yet (for longer than 2 minutes).

    I’ll just wait–these aren’t complaints. I’m here too much, anyway.

    Maybe tomorrow will bring another comprehensive update from Neil.

    Maybe I’ll try FireFox again, although it had some bad problems for me the last time.

  • Flagstaff

    just brings up a blank page right now.

  • bs

    Right now there is a posting titled “My understanding, at least on the New Yorker cover” listed under “Recent Comments”. If I click on that title, it takes me to this diary. But there is no such post in that diary. On another page I was just on, that post doesn’t show up in the “Recent Comments” list.

  • RottDawg

    An example of the broken caching (or ?)

    I was replying to that comment, but it looks like I am actually replying to And “Recent Posts”

    Now I can’t remember what I was going to say…

    Good luck and good night.

  • RottDawg

    I am also getting this again… in IE, it keeps telling me that the website is trying to DL that file… Don’t know what it is, Banner Ad?

  • Erick

    not sure which one. We’re trying to figure it out.

  • Neil_Stevens

    Basically, the engine the site is built on, is too slow. If we query it AT ALL for the cached hits, the site will crash and burn from the load.

    So right now we’re running with some very dumb caching that caches the entire html page, including the sidebar.

    Yes, it’s a total pain, but until we can find ways to speed the engine up, it’s what we’re stuck with, sadly.

  • bs

    I’d remove the Recent Comments and/or Recent Activity boxes from the individual diary pages and count on the Recent Posts page (once it’s working) to track new content. Heck, if nothing else that might take some load off the server. IMHO, having multiple sources of information that are not consistent with each other is no good. That said, they do seem to be staying in sync better today.

    Is it that the engine is too slow, or are the servers too slow for the engine? I noticed you mentioned Python…I assume that’s the issue. Depending on the server platform, it may or may not be an issue (scripting languages are generally not recommended for very-high transaction rate applications – at least I wouldn’t recommend it!) Is there a precedent for a Python-driven dynamic site that sustains the kind of hit rate that RS does?

    (I know this is not the best thread for this conversation – I’d be glad to start a diary to discuss the technical aspects of RS3…us geek types are interested in these things…)

  • Marcus_Traianus

    I have been trying unsuccessfully to login since 3.0 commencement via Blackberry. Model 8300 keeps saying that “cookies need to be enabled”. Problem is my cache says there are cookies being accepted.

    Options setting are MS IE emulation, support javascript.

    Anybody having similar problems?

    I also downloaded Opera Mini, but it was too kludgy. It wouldn’t even permit filling in the login field.

  • bs

    I got the same “cookies” message from my 8830. I have Opera but haven’t tried it yet – my reception here at home is really bad, so I can’t do much testing.

  • Marcus_Traianus

    On any models?

  • bs

    Thursday, July 17th. I posted a diary this morning, and it must have taken 3-4 minutes for it to actually get posted. Most of the day it’s taken a minute or two to get the Tracker to display, or even to browse a diary. Is today a particularly busy server day?