#1: doreen (doreenfanning) on Apr 13, 2010

For the past week or so the main page of puzzles has taken a very long time to load, as had the forum page. Other pages on the site (Find Puzzles, Users, etc.)continue to load quickly so I don't think it is my connection. I've tried a couple of different browsers and a couple of different computers and find the same problem. Kept waiting for it to clear up, but since it hasn't, I thought I'd speak up.

Yep, same here. I noticed it about the same time your host switch to a different server and when Javascript did an update. Other regularly used web sites load normally. I'm using Chrome.

Same for me too.

I have continued to have this same problem -- some of the pages take a loooonnnnggg time to load, others don't. Home page especially takes long. I am finding it discouraging.

Me too. Very frustrating.

I've noticed that some pages are sloooow and others are fast. For instance to go to "your puzzles", I now click on "find puzzles" and then its tab, rather than "home" first.

I think that the trouble is that the database allows only one query per table at a time, so any page that requires a look at the main table has to line up and wait its turn.

So as we get more popular, the wait gets longer. It is noticeably faster at 2am tuesday then at 7pm sunday.

The only solutions are
1)upgrade the server (expensive and it might not help a whole lot) and
2) rewrite the software to optimize and limit table joins (cheap, but unlikely as this is a VOLUNTEER project by Jan. Also, limiting what is pulled from the table would make it faster, but it would also necessarily remove some of the information that is currently displayed.
For example, the Home page probably pulls info from a couple different tables (the main puzzle one and the player one that would store which puzzles you've already done) and then puts them together to hide the puzzles you've finished.

Woah! All of a sudden it's not a problem. "New puzzles" and "Forum" now load up nice and fast. Jan, did you fix something? If not, then I'll try to remember what I did in the past hour that made any difference.

Nevermind. Back to taking forever to load New Puzzles and the Forum, even when there are no new comments.

S l o w

Over the last few days I've done some cleaning up of the database and tuning of the web servers in hopes of getting the performance back up. I think it helped. But to really solve the problem is going to require some serious reprogramming and maybe a change of web servers.

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