Site News

Recent Activity page is back

I had a brainwave about how the Recent Activity page is generated and it seems to work. The page is now re-created every five minutes and seems to do so without keeping the database occupied for ages like it used to. Fingers crossed it’ll keep working like this from now on.

There might be occasions when it lists fewer recent things on the page, depending on the distribution of where annotations are… but it’s certainly better than nothing.

(For the technically minded and interested… Previous versions of the page required joins between the database tables holding annotations and entries, and this was too much for the shared server to cope with without making temporary tables etc. In the most recent previous version of the page, this was taking a few minutes for each of the page’s four lists, and prevente any other queries on the annotations table (such as posting a new annotation). I realised I could get much the same data without any joins, and this takes seconds. Much simpler!)

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Friday 3 February 2012 | Housekeeping

Recent Activity page out of action

I’m afraid I’ve had to stop the Recent Activity page from updating again. The database queries that make these listings are very slow and they’re holding up other features of the site, such as posting annotations.

I’ve tried various alternative methods of making these lists but seem to keep coming up against the fact that the database is a bit low-powered to perform actions with the number of annotations we’ve accumulated plus the many spam annotations that get caught. So I’m looking into moving the database to a more powerful server and will hopefully have things up and running again before too long.

Thanks for your patience!

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Thursday 2 February 2012 | Housekeeping

End of the Diary in Massachusetts

For those unable to make it to the end-of-Diary gathering in London, but might be closer to Massachusetts, here’s something for you! From Carl in Boston and Jeannine Kerwin:

Where the Diary is ending in May, the folks in the Massachusetts will be getting together on May 13th at 1:00 PM, for a “Dutch Treat” lunch at the Wayside Inn, Sudbury MA, USA. Lunch menu here.

Feel free to come for lunch, a snack or a just a visit. We’ll try to make a reservation in advance so if folks can please confirm if they will attend and how many, we’ll get a proper place set aside. Please check your calendars as it may be the last chance to drink at toast to Sam with fellow Pepysians!

We’ll try to firm up the final numbers in early May.

For further details, or to confirm, feel free to contact Carl at carl_wickstrom@comcast.net.

2 comments | Permalink | Tuesday 31 January 2012 | Events

Recent Activity page problems

You may have noticed that the Recent Activity page has been problematic this past week, with the lists of recently-commented-on pages disappearing. It’s all back now, and working OK, but it won’t be updating as frequently as it used to.

The problem was that generating one of those lists took the database four or five minutes, and while this was happening many other operations were held up. It has been the case that whenever a new annotation was posted then the appropriate list would update immediately. Which, of course, meant that every single new annotation required the database to do nothing else for a few minutes.

I’ve looked into ways of making this operation more speedy but it looks like there’s no easy way to do so. The only option for this to happen more quickly is to move this website to a more high-powered webserver — which would be good, but this far into the Diary, and so close to the end, I’m not keen to make such a drastic move!

So for now we have a compromise: The Recent Activity page is back, but it will now only update once per hour. Occasionally you might notice some things slowing down a lot, but it will be rare. This will also, hopefully, mean that posting annotations will be faster than it used to be (“that’s not hard” you might be thinking!).

As ever, let me know if you notice anything particularly wrong, and thanks for your patience.

1 comment | Permalink | Saturday 21 January 2012 | Housekeeping