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As you probably have noticed, our site has been a bit sluggish lately.
We are aware of the issue and are developing plans for dealing with it. The primary issue lies in the database structure and contents. On-the-fly joins across multiple tables cause a performance hit which is exacerbated by the number of stories we have posted over the years (yes, it HAS been that long... YAY!). Further, stories which have been "archived" — allowing no further comments or moderation — are still sitting in the in-RAM DB and could be offloaded to disk for long-term access. Once offloaded, there would be much less data in the in-RAM database (queries against empty DBs tend to be pretty quick!) so this should result in improved responsiveness.
A complicating factor is that changing the structure on a live, replicated database would cause most every page load to 500 out. So the database has to be offlined and the code updated. That would likely entail on the order of the better part of a day. Obviously, shorter is better. On the other hand "The longest distance between two points is a short cut." We're aiming to do it right, the first time, and be done with it, rather than doing it quick-and-dirty, which usually ends up being not quick and quite dirty.
So, we ARE aware of the performance issues, are working towards a solution, and don't want to cause any more disruption than absolutely necessary.
We will give notice well in advance of taking any actions.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday October 11 2018, @12:56AM (1 child)
That's why I was thinking you could switch to RO during the code rollout and then go back to RW once everything is up. Of course, there is a small period of time where reads might screw up. But then again, if you rename the table and make things go through a view before dropping the view and renaming the table back, users may not notice much.
My 2 cents: I have no knowledge of your setup but it might take a while to build it and it will penalize writes over time.
In any case, keep us posted, it's interesting to some of us :)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 12 2018, @03:08AM
Writes are far and away the least of our problems. We could make every write take five seconds and still come off looking fast as hell if our reads are fast, which they were until recently.
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