SoylentNews

Some of you will recall that I recently underwent several bouts of surgery and, despite your welcome comments and good wishes, your best guesses that I was having a sex change, having my breasts enhanced in either size or number, or receiving some fairly radical treatment for hemorrhoids, were all fairly wide of the mark. The surgery is now long past and I have made a reasonable recovery for someone of my age. But I do wish to thank you all for your comments because, almost without exception, they raised a smile when things were not going too well for me.

My wife suffers from a severe medical condition and I have been her full-time carer for over a decade now. Although I wish she had never developed the condition, I expend great effort, and also receive considerable personal satisfaction, in providing many hours of care each day so that she can remain in our home and we can continue our lives to the fullest extent possible. However, she has recently suffered from a deterioration in her condition. This was not unexpected but no-one could say when the next problems would affect her. But the result is that I now have to provide more support to her and my free time is reduced.

I joined this site at its inception and have enjoyed every minute of my time here. But I cannot dedicate the time that role of Editor-in-Chief (E-in-C) deserves and, several weeks ago, I made the difficult decision to stand down from the post. (I can hear the cheering from some in our community even here in France!) The fact that most of you will not have noticed any of this means that the transition has been successful. The entire editorial team (which is nowhere near as large as that phrase makes it sound!) has stepped up to the plate and has maintained the output as it was before, ably led by Martyb who has assumed the role as E-in-C in addition to his numerous other roles on this site. I am grateful to them for their efforts and support both during my time as E-in-C and more recently in their work in editing the stories that we read each day. Thanks guys, you do a tremendous job with relatively little recognition. I've asked the powers-that-be to increase your salaries by an appropriate percentage.[*] I am also grateful to the other folk who do so much in the background keeping this site on-line. You have all become good friends although we could be standing next to each other and wouldn't know it.

Equally important to the site's success are you - the community. You provide the submissions, the comments, the funding, and you are the reason that we have a site at all. I thank each and every one of you for your contribution; from the regular submitters, the ACs, the 'characters', and those of you who just visit to read the stories that we publish. If I have offended anyone then I apologise but being E-in-C has been likened to herding cats in the dark: an almost impossible task and one in which you are certain to make a few mistakes.

Hopefully, I will remain on the site as an editor making whatever contribution I can. But, for the next few months at least, that contribution will be minimal as I have to solve several practical problems on how to make our home function satisfactorily for us both. I trust that you will give Martyb and the team the same support in the future that I have been fortunate enough to enjoy over the past couple of years. Thank you.

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[*] Clarification: This is an inside joke among the staff. Nobody here receives any kind of payment for their efforts on the site; we are strictly volunteers. So, a 20% raise on zero is... still zero. --martyb

martyb writes:

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.

Original Submission