NickA: Flush Your Current Blogware

49 comments on this post so far. Add yours!

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  Howard_Martinson on May 12 at 6:40 a.m.

  Seems to me the old program worked just fine 100% of the time. Then they fixed it.

  Now, it sucks. Any thought given to going back to the old program and then leaving it the &^(*&%(&* alone.

  When it’s not broke, don’t fix it, an old BC (before computers) saying which is more true now than it was 40 years ago.

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  Dennis on May 12 at 6:45 a.m.

  “DFO” >> Did the old blogware operate better than the current one? I can’t remember.>>

  YESSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  BigMac on May 12 at 7:00 a.m.

  The old system was much better. I never understood why you were fixing something that wasn’t broken.

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  Don_Sausser on May 12 at 7:33 a.m.

  M u c h b e t t e r B4.
  When waiting for it to rebirth after viewing comments or going to a link I often find it faster to end and restartthe program.
  DFO - its got to harm page count statistics when folks give up.

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  idawa on May 12 at 8:28 a.m.

  the old site worked, this site doesn’t. It doesn’t matter how many features something has if it doesn’t work. Of all the sites I visit on the web, I think this site has the worst performance of any.

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  JeanieSpokane on May 12 at 8:30 a.m.

  It was a lot better. Sorry, Ryan - it’s not you - it’s the system. It hangs up on me all the time and I have to hit refresh. It’s like it has sleep apnea and I have to punch it to wake it up. I can almost hear the gears shifting and some old sleepy guy going, “What! What! Did I fall asleep again??”

  p.s. I am SOOO glad it isn’t me!

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  MikeK on May 12 at 8:35 a.m.

  Sorry, DFO and Ryan, but Ditto the above. Almost every single time I click on “Recent Comments” I get an error message. And if it takes some time, I bail out and move back to other things since I have so little time to kill anyway. If that got fixed (and I don’t know how it ties to other things) that would improve my experience, anyway.

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  Phaedrus on May 12 at 8:39 a.m.

  Then, the hope I hang onto is the plans to switch HBO to its own Web site this summer.

  Good luck holding on to your readers until then, most folks will do what MikeK does and move on; the more often they have to move on, the less likely they will be to come back.

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  spokelooneh on May 12 at 8:39 a.m.

  In my observation, the new blog platform was not, for several months, slow. But in the past 2.5-3 months it’s gotten slower and slower. Generally the main page loads fine, but transitions are very slow and often time out, and more often than not, need more than one refresh to get the page to load. The same (poor) performance is seen on other S/R blogs.

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  BethB on May 12 at 8:50 a.m.

  Hey, everyone. Here’s a suggestion while kinks are worked out - use a Firefox browser. I think they’re easy to install… HBO is still slow for me on Firefox, but I don’t get error messages, so I’m thinking there is an incompatibility between HBO and IE, more than HBO overall.

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  OrangeTV on May 12 at 8:51 a.m.

  Hate to join this chorus of negative nellies, but it’s true. I thought maybe it was just my computer for a while, even redownloading and reinstalling Firefox, thinking that would help. When I got a new computer for work, I realized it was the site itself. “Recent Comments” is near impossible to view always and other pages are slow as molasses in winter.

  I like the preview feature and the avatar thing, but I really miss being able to post pictures and it seems like the old comment pages used to hold more content, so one could read a whole day or two’s worth of “recent comments” without having to click through a long series of slowly loading pages.

  If someone doesn’t check out HBO for a week, it would take them literally an entire day to catch up on what they missed. It wasn’t always like that…

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  Arch_Druid on May 12 at 8:53 a.m.

  The answer is yes. It loads too slow sometimes and I get a white screen. Then I turn to my bookmarks and sometimes get back to a prior page and sometimes get back to the page with the thread I wanted to comment on. I use Firefox. You could have kept the old software and just tweaked it a little.

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  MikeK on May 12 at 8:58 a.m.

  BethB - I have been a regular and stubborn MS Internet Explorer user for years. I didn’t connect with Firefox for whatever reason. Just last month, though, I downloaded Google Chrome and I’m liking it a lot - using it now in fact. Unfortunately I’m getting the same error messages here in Chrome here that I did in IE.

  Phaedrus - I don’t want to imply that I am bailing out on HBO, not at all. I’m just posting less because I can’t do a quick blurb and get back to what I was doing as easily. So I’m posting less (and I’m busier, so that has something to do with it.)

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  Cindy_H on May 12 at 8:59 a.m.

  Here’s irony for you: when I clicked the comments on this thread guess what page came up? “Internet Explorer cannot display this page.”
  I’ve been dismayed to see the site get slower and slower instead of better and better. I simply don’t have time to hit refresh every few minutes and hope something happens.
  On the plus side, I’m getting a lot more work done :-)

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  Digger on May 12 at 9:11 a.m.

  Ditto all of the above DFO. The old software worked a whole heck of a lot better. And it wasn’t such a pain to post comments (log in, redirect, refresh, type comment, preview, edit comment, reconfirm preview, wait… refresh)

  I’d gladly give up the preview button if we could go back to the old system where photos and YouTubes were plentiful - and HTML coding was still allowed! I miss “Blockquote”!

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  Ryan Pitts on May 12 at 9:30 a.m.

  Out of curiosity - did this begin happening right about 3 weeks ago? And mainly happens on pages that are showing long comment threads?

  I think I know what’s going on.

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  Sisyphus on May 12 at 9:38 a.m.

  Could be Ryan. It has come and gone but it isn’t unique to long comment threads. It has eaten comments though. I use firefox at work and ie at home and don’t notice much difference. I’m not getting error messages, just delays, and sometimes blank screens which I assume was just a page timing out. It happens on Eye on Boise as well.

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  Cabbage Boy on May 12 at 9:39 a.m.

  Well, not sure on the timing, but I think it may have become unbearable at that point. And since the “recent comments” (which are no longer recent when it finally loads) is the worst, I would agree that the comment threads are the worst.

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  JeanC on May 12 at 9:54 a.m.

  I get the occasional blank page when I click on comments. I just hit reload and everything is fine. Outside of that, works fine for me.

  I really do miss being able to post pictures and videos in the comments tho. I do love having the preview so I can correct most of my mistakes :D

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  moscow_minidoka on May 12 at 10:03 a.m.

  “Hey, everyone. Here’s a suggestion while kinks are worked out - use a Firefox browser.”

  I use Firefox, and it seizes up, freezes, and gives me error messages… or big, empty white pages.

  Yes, it’s been worse the past few weeks, but this has been going on for months. And more often than not, I’m checking HBO a couple times a week instead of a couple times a day, because I don’t have the time to hit “refresh” half a dozen times just to catch up on the day’s news… it’s VERY annoying.

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  Cindy_H on May 12 at 10:10 a.m.

  Yes, it worsened about 3 weeks ago. But not only on threads with lots of comments. It seems just clicking the comments button causes delays.

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  spokelooneh on May 12 at 10:13 a.m.

  I normally use Firefox, have tweaked it, turned off my adblocker proxy,shut the firewall off, done the same in IE, no improvement in performance whatsoever. I don’t see any correlation with length of the comment thread as regards to speed.

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  Ryan Pitts on May 12 at 10:19 a.m.

  Well, I’m looking into this right now. I’m pretty sure I’ve tracked down *what* is going on, but I’m not sure how I’m going to fix it yet.

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  LukeB on May 12 at 10:38 a.m.

  I’m available as a consultant to help diagnose issues :-)

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  Ryan Pitts on May 12 at 11:45 a.m.

  Heh, thanks Luke ;)

  The problem isn’t so much in the diagnosis - I hadn’t heard about this issue or I’d have looked into it LONG ago. Unfortunately we are a small staff with many projects, so I’m not able to browse as much as I once did and spot things myself.

  The culprit appears to be the “Recent comments” feature, which feeds the sidebar box on all HBO pages as well as the actual Recent Comments pages. It looks like a couple factors are creating this situation.

  - In the old system, comments were *only* available on blogs, and some blogs (HBO, for instance) even had database tables of comments to themselves. The new site allows comments on all content types, which naturally makes any query operation involving comments more complex.

  - In the old system, pages ran SQL directly against the database. Which gives you a lot of control over your queries, of course, but is just crazy from a security standpoint. The new Django system uses an ORM - much, *much* more secure, and quite convenient compared with writing raw SQL. But sometimes the queries that end up being generated do things a little differently than you’d intended.

  Those two things are causing the problem here, and it’s so noticeable on HBO because of the high volume of both blogposts and comments. You’re all creating the perfect storm ;)

  There are two brutal queries I need to refactor, and I think that should fix the problem. The reason you’re not seeing the problem *all* the time is because we use caching pretty extensively. So query results are stored for a certain time period, and successive pageviews don’t have to hit the database. That explains why, for instance, if you click to the next page of Recent Comments, the page will hang, but then if you refresh, it pops in immediately.

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  spokelooneh on May 12 at 11:53 a.m.

  In my experience, even at low traffic times, like late weekend evenings, the same (bad) performance is evident.

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  Nick_Adams on May 12 at 12:49 p.m.

  Thanks, Ryan, for the explanation and hard work. The recent comments section is easily the link I use most, so if the issues are resolved there, I’ll be eternally grateful.

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  Escapee on May 12 at 9:38 p.m.

  I use wireless internet and my laptop computer is fairly up to date. Many are the times when I’ve clicked links on Huckleberries and Nothing Happens. It’s sorta like the website is saying, “What…you talkin’ to me?” It’s definitely slower, and more complicated than the old website. A classic case of fixing something that wasn’t broken. I like the new site, but I like a site that actually responds in somewhat timely fashion even better. It’s gotta be the Gremlins. Bad, Baaaad Gremlins…

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