I want to torture you. I used to love it, and it's been a long time. I mean, the last time I tortured someone, they didn't even have chainsaws.

Angel ,'Chosen'


Buffistas Building a Better Board  

Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.

To-do list


DXMachina - Aug 21, 2003 3:03:03 am PDT #4706 of 10000
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.

There's another thing we could do that might help, which is enable page caching again. We tried this back in December, but there were complaints that the Message Center wasn't updating. The conversation runs from here:

DXMachina "Buffistas Building a Better Board" Dec 7, 2002 8:37:23 pm PST

to here:

ita "Buffistas Building a Better Board" Dec 7, 2002 9:28:23 pm PST

Right now, if you're paging through a thread, then hit the back button, rather than just showing you a cached version of the last page you looked at (as it did at WX), the system goes back to the database and requeries the database. This is another potential drain if you hit the back button (or the forward button) a lot.


§ ita § - Aug 21, 2003 4:13:15 am PDT #4707 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

DX, that breaks the refresh key. That's why I disabled it before. I really, really, want to work out the right way to do it, because ... that's a big key.

Also breaks the message centre, which I'd rather do explicitly.

Go have a look at the test site and see.


DXMachina - Aug 21, 2003 4:40:49 am PDT #4708 of 10000
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.

I went to the test site, and it works perfectly for me in Mozilla. It caches the pages unless I explicitly hit the reload button, and then they reload. I see your point about the refresh button in IE. Which is a shame, because otherwise it does exactly what we want it to. There has to be a setting somewhere in IE. Bother.


Jon B. - Aug 21, 2003 4:41:07 am PDT #4709 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

that breaks the refresh key.

I can confirm that. Damn.

t edit I was testing with IE.


§ ita § - Aug 21, 2003 4:44:59 am PDT #4710 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

I see your point about the refresh button in IE.

And it's not just the refresh button.

There HAS to be (and I still can't find, despite having looked and asked for months) something that makes the PHP code behave normally. If I click on "Home", I want an updated page. If I hit "back", I want to see the exact same page I just left.

The change breaks re-clicking on home, and breaks refresh in IE.

That's a shitty user experience, and I know there's a way around it. Many PHP sites behave the way phoenix currently does, but not all. I haven't been able to work out what's being done in those.


Jessica - Aug 21, 2003 6:06:21 am PDT #4711 of 10000
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

I have a question -- are we trying to cut down on connections to the database, or queries?

[Because if I'm reading the SQL correctly, then, currently, each query is currently a separate connection, which means than every time someone posts, they're connecting to the database 5 times. I'm not sure if it would be more or less efficient to replace "connectAndQuery" with just "Query" and connect and disconnect only once. It would be a longer connection, but it would be only one.]


Jon B. - Aug 21, 2003 6:31:08 am PDT #4712 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

they're connecting to the database 5 times

Is there a disconnect before the next connect, or are there five simultaneous connections with each post?


Jessica - Aug 21, 2003 6:36:18 am PDT #4713 of 10000
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

Is there a disconnect before the next connect

Yes. They're not simultaneous.


§ ita § - Aug 21, 2003 6:40:22 am PDT #4714 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

There is a disconnect after each connect (see code quoted somewhere above -- except when a post is made). That is the change that was made in response to our exceeding concurrent connections.

The previous functionality was the default -- keep one connection per page (since the mysql_connect function only opens a connection if there isn't already one), closed implicitly when the page processing completed.

Now it's closed explicitly after each query, and Kristen reports this has made a difference, though not as much of one as I had hoped.


Jessica - Aug 21, 2003 6:49:07 am PDT #4715 of 10000
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

That is the change that was made in response to our exceeding concurrent connections.

That's what I suspected. Oh well.

The previous functionality was the default -- keep one connection per page (since the mysql_connect function only opens a connection if there isn't already one), closed implicitly when the page processing completed.

Would it improve performance at all to make the end-of-page close explicit, but not open more than one connection per page?

(It feels terribly inefficient to me, to use 5 connections where one would suffice, but, I'm not a server.)