Click here to Skip to main content
16,015,040 members

Bugs and Suggestions

   

General discussions, site bug reports and suggestions about the site.

For general questions check out the CodeProject FAQs. To report spam and abuse Head to the Spam and abuse watch. If you wish to report a bug privately, especially those related to security, please email webmaster@codeproject.com

 
GeneralTypo in message Pin
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar9-Mar-08 21:49
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar9-Mar-08 21:49 
GeneralRe: Typo in message Pin
Chris Maunder10-Mar-08 1:02
cofounderChris Maunder10-Mar-08 1:02 
General"Normal" + "Last Day" fails to display forum messages. Pin
Maxwell Chen9-Mar-08 21:40
Maxwell Chen9-Mar-08 21:40 
GeneralRe: "Normal" + "Last Day" fails to display forum messages. Pin
Chris Maunder10-Mar-08 1:04
cofounderChris Maunder10-Mar-08 1:04 
GeneralRe: "Normal" + "Last Day" fails to display forum messages. Pin
Maxwell Chen10-Mar-08 1:24
Maxwell Chen10-Mar-08 1:24 
QuestionRe: "Normal" + "Last Day" fails to display forum messages. [modified] Pin
Maxwell Chen10-Mar-08 1:42
Maxwell Chen10-Mar-08 1:42 
GeneralSite respone time Pin
Hans Dietrich9-Mar-08 15:12
mentorHans Dietrich9-Mar-08 15:12 
GeneralThe history of the update Pin
Chris Maunder9-Mar-08 15:45
cofounderChris Maunder9-Mar-08 15:45 
Thanks Hans.

The complete rundown would take pages to go through but here's the basic outline of how things went post upgrade:

0. Tested, tested and tested and were convinced we would be faster than the previous version by sizeable amount.

1. Release. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

2. Anything vaguely non-critical was turned off. Member searches, article filtering by attribute, the 'number of articles found' totals, even the number of articles and members on the homepage. Result: Site was usable again and was (mostly) as quick as it is now though there were still occasions when pages hung and timed out.

3. Caching was aggressively pursued but there was a limit to what we could cache and what had to be realtime. Result: Site was faster overall with less timeouts.

4. All stored procedures were then gone over, again, with a fine tooth comb. Further optimisations were found, some approximations were made in some of the queries that didn't need. Some lock contentions were spotted and fixed. Some functionality that had been limited was reinstated. Result: Database load was reduced slightly (things were already very well tuned) and there were less 'log-jam' events where requests outpaced the capacity to serve those requests.

5. Databases were partitioned vertically and some load balancing done to determine which peices of functionality should be split onto which DB servers. Result: initial visits (first page view) sometimes took 15 seconds at peak load time. This was reduced to usually no more than a few seconds.

6. Further caching based on the results we witness after Google rampaged through the site at 60,000 page views in about 10 minutes. On top of this functionality was modified so that aggressive bots and spiders would not bring the site to its knees. Result: nice increase in first page view speed.


The main killers were errors and new version releases.

1. Errors meant the site simply didn't function, or that the processing of errors when something went wrong in turn caused massive slowdowns as the code hunted around trying to find the next best course of action. We have a very flexible system which means our errors can be a royal pain to find, but we think we have this mostly under control

2. We were releasing new versions of the code multiple times a day up until a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes this was no more than just a spelling mistake, some broken javascript or a formatting error. Sometimes it was a revamp of a major peice of infrastructure. The problem we find is that a new release can cause a massive deadlock as all the webservers when they try serve all requests that had built up while they recompiled while also recaching the data they keep on hand. Updating a single server will cause an outage of a few seconds. Updating them all at once can cause 5 - 10 mins of downtime.

Outages are a weird thing in that you can visit the site 10 times and read a page and then forget you ever visited, but then you try and visit during an update and you will remember that 5 minute outage for the rest of the day. It was at the point where I could tell the size of my inbox by the number of updates we'd done that day.

For now, though, we're down to 2-3 updates a week as we fix bugs, add new features and continue working on expanding capacity. I'm in Australia for a couple of weeks on family matters which means I can do updates when most of our visitors are safely offline.

3. SQL issues. SQL Server was crashing a lot, especially after we released new code on the web servers. We talked to Microsoft and found that reducing the amount of memory we allowed SQL to use fixed this. Yes, we think this is ridiculous, too.


We have two major improvements to make:

1. Turning on our database load balancing system. We're looking at a 33% increase in write capability, and hopefully somewhere in the vicinity of 40%+ speed increase in reads. Stage 2 of this will increase this significantly and may be combined with a hardware upgrade

2. Some cleverness in our attribute matching system that drives all content display. This should bring significant speed improvements

At the moment we are database limited and have not paid too much attention to web application object creation and GC issues. Once (if) we see these being an issue we'll tackle them, but for the moment we're being thrifty with our use of development time.

cheers,
Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP

GeneralRe: The history of the update Pin
Hans Dietrich9-Mar-08 17:17
mentorHans Dietrich9-Mar-08 17:17 
GeneralOld new bug Pin
Hans Dietrich9-Mar-08 15:08
mentorHans Dietrich9-Mar-08 15:08 
GeneralRe: Old new bug Pin
Chris Maunder10-Mar-08 1:03
cofounderChris Maunder10-Mar-08 1:03 
General[Bug] Apply license to article Pin
Nish Nishant9-Mar-08 4:41
sitebuilderNish Nishant9-Mar-08 4:41 
GeneralRe: [Bug] Apply license to article Pin
Nish Nishant9-Mar-08 4:43
sitebuilderNish Nishant9-Mar-08 4:43 
GeneralRe: [Bug] Apply license to article Pin
Scott Dorman10-Mar-08 5:06
professionalScott Dorman10-Mar-08 5:06 
GeneralRe: [Bug] Apply license to article Pin
Nish Nishant11-Mar-08 1:31
sitebuilderNish Nishant11-Mar-08 1:31 
General[BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Vikram A Punathambekar8-Mar-08 22:18
Vikram A Punathambekar8-Mar-08 22:18 
GeneralRe: [BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Chris Maunder8-Mar-08 23:48
cofounderChris Maunder8-Mar-08 23:48 
GeneralRe: [BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Vikram A Punathambekar9-Mar-08 0:59
Vikram A Punathambekar9-Mar-08 0:59 
GeneralRe: [BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Mladen Janković9-Mar-08 9:17
Mladen Janković9-Mar-08 9:17 
GeneralRe: [BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Vikram A Punathambekar10-Mar-08 17:31
Vikram A Punathambekar10-Mar-08 17:31 
GeneralRe: [BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Mladen Janković10-Mar-08 17:53
Mladen Janković10-Mar-08 17:53 
GeneralRe: [BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Luc Pattyn9-Mar-08 2:33
sitebuilderLuc Pattyn9-Mar-08 2:33 
GeneralRe: [BUG] Sri Lanka time zone is incorrect Pin
Nish Nishant9-Mar-08 4:48
sitebuilderNish Nishant9-Mar-08 4:48 
GeneralBug: Bad Intrasite Links Pin
Jeffrey Walton8-Mar-08 2:08
Jeffrey Walton8-Mar-08 2:08 
GeneralRe: Bug: Bad Intrasite Links Pin
Chris Maunder8-Mar-08 16:22
cofounderChris Maunder8-Mar-08 16:22 

General General    News News    Suggestion Suggestion    Question Question    Bug Bug    Answer Answer    Joke Joke    Praise Praise    Rant Rant    Admin Admin   

Use Ctrl+Left/Right to switch messages, Ctrl+Up/Down to switch threads, Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right to switch pages.