This week in coding

[elz]

Performance: I fixed a couple small bugs recently, but mostly I've been working on the filters and on overall site performance. We've been talking about colocation (owning the servers!), and that's important and it's exciting, but I feel a little guilty that we haven't done everything we can to make the site run better from a coding perspective yet. It's kind of a funny situation, because we don't have a lot of users right now, but we have a lot of features, we have a lot of code, and we have a moderate amount of data already, at least from my perspective - 4,000+ stories, 8,000+ tags. We'll surely have a whole lot more at some point, though, so if pages are already slow, that's a bad sign. (I take it very personally when things don't work. I should maybe stop doing that. The filters were keeping me up at night!)

So I started using some profiling tools to see how things broke down, and I think I was able to make some significant improvements: I reduced the number of SQL queries, increased the number of indexes, and started adding some caching. And now I'm really psyched for the next beta deployment (the goal is to do one next weekend). There will hopefully be some noticeable improvements. *crosses fingers* The next thing I want to tackle is the fandoms page and some of the back-end handling of translations.

We're also planning to talk more to systems-type people about traffic and loads and what our current system can handle, and what our new system will/needs to be able to handle, and how we can gauge when we're able to take on new people. I'm so eager to get out of closed beta, but you obviously can't be all "come use our archive! *CRASH* oops, just kidding!" - how much would that suck? So there's got to be some degree of ramping up to it, and hopefully lots of planning and research will lead to a smooth transition.

Favorite new bug: Apparently there was a problem that only manifested if you posted more than 30 series. Bugs are bad, but how cool is it that someone even noticed that?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Lots of improvements to various admin pages! Our poor admins - those pages kind of got shortchanged when we were rushing to start our closed beta, and it's always easiest to put off fixing things that most users don't see. It's important stuff, though. Also, there's a fraught, epic battle going on to get all the html people put into their works displaying properly under all conditions. There's design and discussion going on about browsing, searching and challenges. And people are already talking about Yuletide. :)

Code Revisions
Committed: 1321
Currently Testing: 1321
Deployed: 1278

Comments

[hl]

Apparently there was a problem that only manifested if you posted more than 30 series. Bugs are bad, but how cool is it that someone even noticed that?

O_O Way cool! Was that one of the super-testers, or a user that actually has more than thirty series?

[elz]

A user! Which is awesome.

[samvara]

*plans*

*researches*

[elz]

*bribes*

*enables*

[samvara]

*schemes*

*conspires*