I mentioned it on plurk to Emily but I thought I should mention it here as well: DW's last email (which, damn, I didn't save) said that really active posts that reach over 2500 comments affect the performance of the site. In other words, once a post gets over that many comments, it's taxing to their servers. A lot of our log posts and memes get larger than that so I was wondering if, to be Good Citizens of DW, we should have a policy to start new logs/posts when the current ones get too big.
THAT IS ALL CARRY ON.
ETA: I DO still have the email in Rapunzel's inbox! Here's the excerpt; I put the relevant passage in bold print. Love you guys:
State of the Servers
We've had some slowdowns in the evenings (US time) the last few days. This is related to our nightly maintenance and to the server load (it happens in the evenings because that's when a lot of our maintenance tasks run). [staff profile] mark and our backup sysadmin [personal profile] alierak are working on optimizing the servers, and we're starting in on some efforts to optimize the code. (And if you've got experience in optimizing web applications, we'd love to have you come and help! [staff profile] mark, who's our optimization guru, is being pulled in eight thousand different directions, and having a newborn around is not always conducive to hack time...)
Fixing this kind of problem takes a while: there are lots of little things we can do (and we're doing them) but load-related problems and optimization is a thousand-headed hydra. (Cut off one head and two grow back!) We'll stay on top of it, but if you notice 10-15 minutes of site slowness in the evenings, that's what's causing the problem.
Meanwhile, if you'd like to help out without knowing anything about code or optimization: one of our biggest load problems is entries that have a high number of comments -- loading those entries causes a big hit -- and we've been seeing an increase in the number of entries with lots of comments lately. If even a few high-traffic journals or communities started opening new posts when comments reached 2000 or 2500 instead of letting the post run until it hit the maximum number of comments, it would definitely help.
We're giving heavy attention to optimizing that particular use case, but depending on how the optimization work looks, we may have to tweak the number of comments an entry can receive downward temporarily. Keep an eye on [site community profile] dw_maintenance for more updates.
no subject
THAT IS ALL CARRY ON.
ETA: I DO still have the email in Rapunzel's inbox! Here's the excerpt; I put the relevant passage in bold print. Love you guys:
State of the Servers
We've had some slowdowns in the evenings (US time) the last few days. This is related to our nightly maintenance and to the server load (it happens in the evenings because that's when a lot of our maintenance tasks run). [staff profile] mark and our backup sysadmin [personal profile] alierak are working on optimizing the servers, and we're starting in on some efforts to optimize the code. (And if you've got experience in optimizing web applications, we'd love to have you come and help! [staff profile] mark, who's our optimization guru, is being pulled in eight thousand different directions, and having a newborn around is not always conducive to hack time...)
Fixing this kind of problem takes a while: there are lots of little things we can do (and we're doing them) but load-related problems and optimization is a thousand-headed hydra. (Cut off one head and two grow back!) We'll stay on top of it, but if you notice 10-15 minutes of site slowness in the evenings, that's what's causing the problem.
Meanwhile, if you'd like to help out without knowing anything about code or optimization: one of our biggest load problems is entries that have a high number of comments -- loading those entries causes a big hit -- and we've been seeing an increase in the number of entries with lots of comments lately. If even a few high-traffic journals or communities started opening new posts when comments reached 2000 or 2500 instead of letting the post run until it hit the maximum number of comments, it would definitely help.
We're giving heavy attention to optimizing that particular use case, but depending on how the optimization work looks, we may have to tweak the number of comments an entry can receive downward temporarily. Keep an eye on [site community profile] dw_maintenance for more updates.