Working on it!

Just pushed a bunch of code fixes for the forums, hopefully they speed up a little bit now :)

Now that I've got the item hovers loading, I'm working on this. Hopefully some improvements over the next few hours :)

I just pushed a bunch of my cache changes for the forums, which should speed them up throughout the day as people view threads. I hadn't finished them all but figured it's better to push anything at this point :)

I'm still working on it. Right now we're pushing a lot of changes with the way that we do our logging, moving them out of our main database and into a system specifically designed for them.

That frees up the database for a lot of the more expensive operations (every post for example has to get the user information, avatar information, achievement count, etc) which should help with the forum speed indirectly but the overall site speed by a significant amount.

After that I can go back to looking at all of the data on the forums.

Alright, just pushed a few more significant changes for this. Let me know if you see any improvement!

If you refresh on this page - it'll be blazing fast. I think the problem is that forum posts aren't staying in cache long enough. Working on it :)!

It should cache the first time the thread is viewed by anyone :/

I think it's possible we're over caching now, though, so I'm going to try and figure out how to resolve that.

Just pushed a few more changes :)

All I know is that this is an issue that is constantly being worked on. I am not personally really having any lag issues tbh.

It's totally not just you , I've done just about all of the things on the forums that I can to speed them up outside of us buying a HUGE memcached instance (because right now it's caching every post - but they fall out of cache pretty quickly because forum posts can be quite large), but I'm working on moving them to a more instant solution which you can see here which loads posts as you view them instead of trying to load a million posts at a time.

(Obviously not the styling or functionality / posts are truncated)

[edit]

(this may or may not work idk - click on topics at the start)

They aren't broken they're just big. We have 13 million posts, all full text, in a MySQL database which isn't really what they were meant to do. Most forums on the internet don't get to be this size (yay for us, but also boo for us!) and it makes going through all of them really hard.

We have a few options. Something like the link I posted above which loads each post separately via javascript (which you can see takes a second for data to show up), loading the text part of the forums into another type of database (where we have all of our logs now is a great example) but we saw the growing pains last time I moved a bunch of data around ;).

I've pushed some changes tonight that hosts our forums in two places. One in our own database (no change) and one with it an elasticsearch server (which means soon forums will be searchable again, yay!) where it checks for the post first.

Its cold now, meaning there are very few actual posts on it, but as you browse the forums this should improve.

OKAY, I've just pushed some changes to my dev. Check out the forums there, click on a few topics.

The posts load one by one which make the page itself load MUCH faster. Let me know what you see, or if you have any weird issues.

They don't link correctly? Hmm, I made them have a min-height (the loading frame) and they link correctly for me, I just tried a few of them. Are you using chrome or firefox?

Yeah, the locking up thing is frustrating, I need to figure out how to better batch the request (or merge them) for the threads. Also right now this is really just a lopped off version of the current forums, it's fetching a lot of data per post that isn't really needed so the individual posts could be sped up a lot, I think.

That's so weird, because this is my experience.

Is it weird that I actually prefer it sending me to the middle of the page?

Either way give my dev a check again, it's got some changes so that the front page (hopefully) loads faster, and some changes so that less information is being sent with each post so hopefully less browser lag. If you still get it, I may just have to decrease the # of posts per page.

Hm, try now / what error is it giving you?

Hmm, okay. How long would you say the lag is? Is the lag WHILE the posts have already popped up (you can see the loading icons) or before the page even gets there?

And yeah, I know why the direct link thing is broken (some posts are obviously larger than the min-height I put on the container) so I'll just have to make it check for that after you've loaded the page and send you there.

Can you give it a load now?

(Also the scrolling thing SHOULD work)