Bug Reporting II

Please explain how changing to GMT would change the formatting of dates and time stamps?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

That looks like a bug to me. All dates and times are supposed to be rendered in the format specified on the member's profile page of the member reading the message, not that of the message author. It looks like this isn't happening for edit date/time tags. I no longer recall the issues I faced while implementing this, either I was constained in what I could do or it's a bug, I'll take a look at the code tonight.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Check out this link and see if anything is wrong...http://EvC Forum: What kind of atheist are you? -->EvC Forum: What kind of atheist are you?

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We are BOG. Resistance is voltage over current.

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

Ha ha ha. There are a lot of HTML tags in that blurb that is being cut'n'pasted. People are cut'n'pasting too quickly and leaving off one or more of the closing tags.That's my guess.

Thats correct. The problem is happening when ppl just want the scores NOT the opening paragraph. That paragraph is part of a larger table that hold the inner tables with the graph. They are grabbing the cut and paste after the paragraph, but they are leaving the closing tags for the opening table still at the end of the c&p.

I'm becoming increasingly concerned about website performance. It seems like it has become increasing slower over the course of this year. I do plan to investigate soon whether the fault lies with the server or the board software, but there's another possibility that I wonder if anyone has some informed ideas about.One measure that some people might have noticed creeping up is the number of visitors at the site at any given time. It's generally in the range of 400 to 600 visitors. I don't think they're all lurkers. We're indexed by all the major search engines and a few minor ones, too, which is good, but it might also be part of the problem. Sites like Google and Yahoo are always among the top consumers of our bandwidth, but worse than that, I think that EvC Forum must frequently pop up in answer to searches, and this is confirmed by site statistics. Many visitors to the site arrive here through what are called "referrals", and Google and Yahoo are very common referral sites. This means that most of the visitors aren't lurkers, but just people seeking information who are passing through.Yesterday I did a couple of rough measures and discovered that on average a page at the site is visited about 120 times per minute. Each page access requires compilation and interpretation of about 36,000 lines of Perl code. Does anyone out there have a gauge on whether this is a significant server load or not? It seems like a lot to me, but I other than what I do to keep the site going I have no background in this area.Thanks for any info!

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Sometimes it does take a long time for a page to load, and this can occur (for me) in any situation. However, there are a couple of situations where it becomes more likely for a long-load time:When I post a message. By logging in on another window, I can see that my message has been posted, but it takes a long while for the page to load on the original window.When I edit a message. This almost guarantees a long load time. Except, by logging on another window, I can see that it's actually taking a long time to post the changes, not loading the message window itself.I don't know whether this helps.

You could do any or all of the following three things to solve your problem.(1) Make the threads readable only to people logged on as members.(2) Starting now, make people jump through 20 or so hoops to become a member. Might I suggest making it mandatory to answer 100 questions.(3) Charge $20 for any new membership.

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Disclaimer:

​

Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

​

He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

That`s the price of fame, Percy. At least you aren`t being hounded by paparrazzi.
My message replies have been slow for months. Since it`s a sort of rule of thumb on websites that new visitors have an attention span of seven seconds, can you direct queries via search engines to our Page One, with a search box to slow (and discourage) all bar the determined?

You have a PC in front of you.Can you execute a PERL loop with a moderate mix of instructions in it?The server is running at least 72,000 lines of PERL a second. I simply can't remember comparable numbers for other environments (It's been over 6 years and there were soooo many different numbers ).At a guess PERL (if it is pretty efficient) is doing 10 or so machine instructions per line and 720,000 instructions per second seems like a light enough load if all we are looking at is the PERL cpu load.There is a heck of a lot more than that going on though. I'm sure you're making a ton of op sys service calls in there and they can be at least of an order of magnitude more expensive.

How about running with mod_perl? Judging from the nature of the site and that all content is dynamic that may provide a huge performance boost.

Since Perl is interpreted, I imagine it's doing at least a thousand machine instructions per line just for compilation. And since Perl is a compact language, post-compilation interpretation of a line could take millions of instructions, e.g., this performs a text substitution on all locations of an array that could be of any conceivable size, and the text strings could also be of any conceivable size, such as the contents of an entire message: About six months ago I gave our server name server responsibility. In other words, instead of delegating lookup of the name "" to some anonymous name server, our server now performs this lookup itself. That means our server gets invoked every time anybody anywhere clicks on a link to . But no name server process appears in the list of most active processes, so I don't think this is a contributor unless the overhead expresses itself in some more subtle way. There's the MySQL calls, too. Membership is already in MySQL, and the next version will move the forums, threads and messages to MySQL, too.Another possible contributor to poor performance could be the size of the message database. We never delete anything, so it could be a case of too much time being spent reading and searching long files containing lists of threads and messages.As someone above noted, posting a message takes a long time. Figuring out why could be an important clue, but this problem only manifests itself on the server, not on my development machine, and so investigating this while the site is active has to be done carefully.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

You are correct about the performance advantages. I investigated a possible conversion to mod-perl a couple years ago and found that initialization was a significant problem. When you run a Perl program from scratch, it's compiled, initialized and then interpreted. When you run in mod-perl, the Perl program is compiled once, initialized once, then repeatedly interpreted. The variable values at the next invocation are whatever they were at the end of the previous invocation. So everywhere in the program where something like this takes place that depends upon a variable beginning in the undefined state has to be modified, like this example which has to be modified from this: To this: Not much of a change, but the places where you're doing something like this are not usually so obvious. And, if I didn't make this clear enough before, THERE ARE 36,000 LINES OF CODE TO BE EXAMINED FOR SUCH CASES. Sorry for shouting.That's not the only issue raised by mod-perl, but I should have kept a list because I find I don't recall details at this point.So, can I put you in charge of the EvC Forum Mod-Perl Conversion Project?

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

my ($x);
map {if (/^msg=(.*)/) {$x.=$1}} @A;
if ($x) {...do something...}(

I am sure that this will work in a mod_perl environment and the "undef" is not necessary. When you declare the variable with the "my" the variable is reinitialized.You are right though, you would have to search for all accumulating functions ie (.=, +=, and push) and be sure all variables are declared. I have learned that "use strict;" while annoying is your friend in the long run Sure, one of my trades is a Perl slinger. However, I am booked right now but maybe this fall or winter.

You could be right, my memory might have faded. I can't remember now if I did the test runs with mod-perl before or after the "use strict" conversion - in other words, in the "old days" there was very little use of "my". Mod-perl might be less of a problem now.However, I still suspect something is up with the server. Whatever is stealing the cycles is hidden. When posting a message, the search database, which is in a file, gets tied to a variable while it's updated, and the untie sometimes is quick, and sometimes takes 10-20 seconds. It's beyond my expertise to diagnose this any further.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director