Posted on 10/11/2012 8:11:29 PM PDT by hole_n_one
Yet again, FR fails the big LIVE THREAD test.
How does what is supposed to be the premiere conservative site on the 'net continue to fail?
I would have expanded on this except it took forever to get this simple post through the muck and molasses that we have to wade thru on night's like this.
LDOTTER NOTE: Hit again! Our apologies for last night's crash. Thousands got on anyway. Looks like the same wily Chinese hackers have targeted us again. We're not alone. We hear our friends at FreeRepublic got a DOS attack as well. Luis beats them back but they come in droves like in the old movies.
"LDOTTER NOTE: Hit again! Our apologies for last night's crash. Thousands got on anyway. Looks like the same wily Chinese hackers have targeted us again. We're not alone. We hear our friends at FreeRepublic got a DOS attack as well. Luis beats them back but they come in droves like in the old movies."
MUAWIYAH NOTE: I was on a different thread at the time the attack started ~ had just hit post on a response and was waiting for the edit to come back and waited and waited and waited and after it'd spun out over 5 minutes I knew the next words on TV would be "We turn now to this evening's debate and the candidates are coming on the stage"
Washingtonpost.com was also slow and posts to one thread were showing up on another.
So, everybody has old and dirty eqipment, or the networks tie up too much bandwith, or the Chicoms, or the porn vendors in Bylorussia or Bulgaria?
Its Called $$$$....
You want more reliability and scalability have to pay for it somehow... and it ain’t cheap.
Bttt
I confess that I had a couple of shots of schnapps myself
last night during the debate. One of the great things I
enjoy about FR is the off the wall humor here.
It got a LITTLE slow at times....but, at least I could get on.
RE: post above...I’m referring to TWITTER
Typically the way heavily visited websites get more bandwidth is by a front end that sends the visitor to one of a group of virtual machines (or real ones). However in the case of FR the data viewed isn’t mostly static. People are beating on threads that they expect to see updated in real time. If multiple machines are sharing the load, they all also have to get all updates from one another and merge them. For applications like this, a big hunk of modern IBM iron with its raw, screaming I/O capability might beat a gaggle of Wintel blades running Linux. But the budget isn’t there to buy that million dollar computer.
ansel,
Do you know how many freepers got drunk during the debate between G.W.B and the ketchup/ketsup queen whenever the queenie said, “I have a plan!”???
Evidently, we should have consulted you first. Oy vey. So sally my fliend. Sssshhhhh!!!
It was frustrating. I tried for an hour to post too, and missed some debate moments, which I didn’t notice until I watched it in the rerun later (west coast showed it 2x).
Were you going to yell at me or agree? Lol.
PS: Looky uppy sarcasm..., ansell 1 or 2 or 3 or....
I still keep in touch with a guy I met in a compuServe conservative chat room too. We just had our third baby last year.
(Yes, we are married... ) ;)
Same here.
This might be a really dumb question from a non-techie:
How do chat rooms hold so many people in real time constantly chatting? While the chat would not be save able like FR threads, wouldn’t it be easier to get into and keep running in fast real time?
Couldn’t FR create a chat room only for special occasions? It would be up to JR to determine which events were worth opening the room for. Surely debates and election nights would be essential.
Would that help? Everyone just wants to be in a room with likemindeds at these times. We want to express ourselves and see how others are feeling. It has to be fast. But it doesn’t have to be a thread for eternity.
What about a special event chat room rather than a live thread?
You've got to be kidding me. Unlimited probably means "until you use all our capacity", 24/7 support is someone in India that doesn't speak English, and your processing power might be one core on a vitual machine.
Some years back there were some performance problems. We have the option of choosing displays of 20 / 50 / 100 / 250 items and I recall John putting in a change to cap it at 25 for the duration.
I don't know what the bottleneck is but last night was frustrating, and I finally gave up veiwing the live thread.
In the old days folks got cranky when the live threads were photobombed. That may have been due to a larger share of dial-ups than now.
Chat rooms simply echo input out to everyone that is connected. There's no record. The equivalent to an FR thread is if everyone was constantly reloading their browser and displaying everything that had been written since the post was started.
However, I think that a chat room would be a good idea. There are open source implementations out there, and a simple Java client could be downloaded into your browser. It wouldn't work for some tablets and phones, but it would be available to almost everyone else.
This is why I think the memcache would help.
I don't know exactly how their database is organized. But, if it is broken down into a row for every posting, then each of those could be cached with a unique key. That way, you can construct a thread from the posts in the cache.
Alternatively, there could be a cache entry for each posting, and the number of posts to the thread are embedded in the key. A quick check to a separate table in the cache to determine the number of postings would tell you if that cache entry would be valid, and it can be used to generate a posting. The cache entry would only become invalid when another post was added to the thread. The idea is simply to use the cache in place of a database queries, when possible.
Since it really seems to slow down during these live thread periods, I suspect what is really wrong is a table-locking constraint. If they are using MySQL for the back-end, it locks an entire table for an update -- which means that all read queries to that table have are blocked. Postgres and Oracle have row-based locking.
If that is the case, memcache would help, but only if was used it to reduce the number of read queries.
I would think between FReepers we could work something out with the yahoo alternative account or even those FReepers on FB using FB to recap and update coverage for these upcoming live thread events.
Whoever is starting the live thread that evening should include links to the alternatives in the first post. Smart FReepers will bookmark them in the event FR is unavailable.
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