Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan Overlord here.
Last week I wrote briefly about slowness being caused by attempts to debug a comments plugin used by several Ozblogistan blogs — Brian’s Latest Comments — in the context of Larvatus Prodeo. It transpires that LP’s database of comments was too large to process without causing errors and slowdowns. During the week I worked on various modifications; these ‘work’ in that they have the correct behaviour and don’t crash, but in actual use they have proved to be unacceptably slow.
Consequently I have asked our blogs to deactivate the offending plugin for a few weeks. Our busiest, Catallaxy Files and Larvatus Prodeo, have done so, which should for now improve performance for everyone.
Why have I asked them to deactivate it for a few weeks? Because yours truly is moving to Darwin to take up a new job. I won’t have my usual computer for 3 weeks, according to the removalists. Once I am settled in I have another plan of attack to try, but until then I will not be in a position to easily fix things. Until then, enjoy the blogging.
Enjoy your visit to Darwin, Jacques Chester!
Great: so the shift to ozblogistan means worse service and more jacques chester. Enjoy the blogging indeed.
Brutal, isn’t it?
Am in awe of folk like Jacques- ten years on and my PC is still an adventure to me and that’s including some of the basics.
Lucky Jacques! If I were
twentythirty years younger (I keep forgetting I’m nearly 60) and had fewer ties in Adelaide, I’d move to Darwin in a heartbeat.Darwin’s great. I’ve missed it while living in Perth.
The main problem is that our beloved BLC plugin was written for a much earlier version of WordPress, where its memory-hogging attributes were not such problems for blog function as a whole. Now that WordPress has bloated egregiously, poor old BLC simply canna cut the mustard. It was struggling on the previous server as well, if you remember how slow the page load sometimes was.
I’m sure that we’ll come up with something at least better than the WordPress default. Eventually. It’s just that sometimes the core software brutally leaps ahead of the add-ons, and that may well be the case this time around.
I’m with paul w. I didn’t use a keyboard until I was 57.
I can jinx most things to do with computing, but mucking up the comments facility and slowing the whole site down is a new achievement for me!
Jacques, when I travelled around a bit on the public purse the one place I didn’t get to was Darwin, but it always sounded seductive and fascinating!
It also has to do with the size of archives. It works fine for small blogs with a few thousand comments / hundred posts. But sites like Catallaxy Files and LP have tens of thousands of comments and new ones come in every minute, invalidating the MySQL query cache. So the problem is a design one too, which I hope to address in future.
True: it works fine for us over at Hoyden because we only get a fraction of the comments.
For those who want to be able to follow a particular discussion, there is of course an alternative to doing so via the BLC sidebar – use each post’s
Comments RSSfeed. The RSS feed link is at the top of the post’s Comments List, under the Responses heading, for every post – or alternatively just add/feed/to the post-URL to add it to your feed reader.#8, Brian this a singular moment for both of us then.
An unforseen victory over our tormenters, at the very knell.
Oh the price of fame…
Scale often seems to be the biggest single problem with software, writing code for something to do one job when you have buckets of memory and a fat big process dying to get to work is one thing but writing it efficiently is something else entirely.
Something like the paradigm shift the world at large has to make if we consider how to live sustainably and not keep consuming the world’s resources like there is no tomorrow.
If this is the tech support thread (sorry if it ain’t)…
The front page (larvatusprodeo.net) is currently displaying a random article (‘Yar’, on the Pirate Party) from last August, comment thread and all, instead of the proper front page. Something kooky’s going on.
Second the observation by bird of paradox- the site seems very unstable at the moment.
Apart for being directed to “Yar” which was posted in August 2009 as the current home page ,the recent comments list changes with each click through on a link.
It appears that when we click on a link on we are being directed to cached pages from various times in the past?
@Bird of Paradise. @murph the surf – this will do as a proxy tech support thread, I guess.
I can’t reproduce that homepage error with my own browser (Firefox/WinXP) – what browser/computer platform configuration are you two using?
That’s definitely not supposed to be happening, and it’s not happening for me – perhaps doublecheck your browser’s cache configurations/clear your cache? If you are still seeing the usual Recent Comments sidebar you are looking at a cached version of the site (you should be seeing the default WordPress comments widget), but it’s certainly not being forced by us.
Thanks for the update. I did wonder if comments were a wee bit borked yesterday. Enjoy the move Jacques.
This seems like as good a place as any to ask, if there is a way to switch off the mobile theme while viewing LP on a phone? The slider isn’t working again and my old trick of adding /?mobile=0 has not worked since the move to ozblogistan.
IE and WIN XP.
Just went to Club Troppo and first the home page lead to a Don Arthur page from 2008 . second attempt was a piece by M Bahnisch from 2005!
Maybe it is an Ozblogistan based issue?
@furious balancing, @murph the surf
I attempted to tweak the mobile theme settings and odd things occurred – when viewing on iPhone/Safari, the homepage sent me to a post of mine from 2009!
So, I’m going to disable the mobile theme entirely and see if that helps at all.
thanks, tigtog. I am on the laptop at the moment because the comments fields weren’t working with the mobile theme on the phone.
I checked and all seems fine on the phone now [iPhone/safari too, btw]
Oh well, I’m glad that simply turning off a plugin could help you. So the homepage is working OK for you? It’s still redirecting to 2009 for me on my iPhone, tho’ the desktop works fine.
Most odd.
yep, just checked again and homepage is fine for me.
“It appears that when we click on a link on we are being directed to cached pages from various times in the past?”
This is happening to me too, and only since the site moved – yesterday I was clicking on a link that said a post had, say, 98 comments, and the link was taking me through to a version of the page with only, say, 50.
Weird. And it’s not happening anywhere else…
I’ve done about as much as I can do from my corner of the admin section – the rest will have to wait for Jacques to kick some daemons about.
I upgraded WPTouch yesterday, so if this behaviour is new, that might be a regression they introduced.
Also, persons wishing to spelunk in the offending code are directed to github for code and to my notes on the problem.