Forum Activity for @tig

Using Button Functions

Jamroom Developers

@michael

Since I have a working solution (hoisted by your earlier 'except' workaround) I removed the workaround and included the winning syntax. Now jrCore_item_list_buttons works like a charm. Major thanks.

( Also good to know about the listener trick to implement excludes. )

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Jamroom Hosting

@brian - Thanks. This will substantially improve our understanding of our site dynamics.

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Jamroom Hosting

@brian

We have discussed trimming operations. Actions is the first on the chopping block. The home page widgets seem to be tuned rather well at this point. Columnists would be the most likely to impact the db. But I would like to look at hard metrics to identify misbehaving widgets. I could insert my own timer code but would rather use existing tools. Do I have access to tools you use (or at least a portion of them) to identify poor performing widgets? Is so, where might I find them?

Thanks, by the way, for your excellent support.

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Jamroom Hosting

@brian


We have established an entirely different UX for the next major version of the site. It will be quite different from what exists today (from scratch redesign) and is indeed partitioned for performance (and a modern UX material style). In particular, the clutter and redundancy will be gone and the design is far more role-based usage centric.

But I am faced with a current site that is what it is. We (NT) can certainly discuss reducing the clutter to a degree but the last thing I want to do is try to refactor this website instead of developing its more modern incarnation. So our changes would necessarily be modest. We will, nevertheless, seriously investigate this.

Now, just to be clear, you are telling me that the best way to deal with being JOIN-challenged is avoid doing JOINs. Of course I agree with that. But you also seem to be saying that reducing the number of comment records by 40% is not valuable for those cases where we cannot avoid JOINs (and any other db operation that ultimately involves serial searches). Seems to me that a small comments table would perform well even with inefficient db queries but as the record count grows the inefficiencies will manifest as performance problems. Ergo, the fewer records the better. How is that not the case?

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Jamroom Hosting

@brian

Now, on this in particular:


Would it be practical for us to consider migrating from jrDiscussion to jrForum?

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Jamroom Hosting

@brian

As noted, we are indeed focused on the delete. The 'archive', per se, is simply a measure for prudence.

Every site will have different functionality. NT could easily support many more comments if the comments were not so verbose. Plus, as we have seen, NT's number of comments imposes rather severe limitations on functionality. When a site must refrain from JOIN operations, etc. one naturally looks for a way to reduce the number of records under consideration. So a site with basic comment functionality could handle far more comments than one that gets 'fancy' with its functionality.

In short, if one is JOIN-challenged because of the number of records in its tables would it not be valuable to reduce the number of records by 40%?
updated by @tig: 11/16/17 10:24:33AM

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Jamroom Hosting

@paul

Addressing your question from a different perspective, we could also remove older items such as actions. In a sense, the site could realistically purge user content (and shadows of same) older than 6/1/2015.

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Jamroom Hosting

@paul

Comments is the 800lb Gorilla. So if there is a reason to not do articles and discussions, just doing comments (with referential integrity of course) would be 90% of the intent.

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Jamroom Hosting

Yes, this is for performance reasons. No value bogging the indexes with stale records that are likely never accessed (and in reality we can live without anyway). A 40% reduction gives us some breathing room at least with respect to db activity.

The archiving certainly can be done in several ways. We would do it only to be prudent since there is no expectation of ever revisiting those records. My key concern is slicing off interrelated records with integrity. This is not something we want to do without high confidence that we will have no side-effects.

Logically, we are looking for the equivalent of deleting all discussions, blogs and associated comments older than 6/1/2015. Further, if we were to remove ALL comments older than 6/1/2015 that would remove comments posted on the 'walls', etc. If we delete comments using the tools, I presume that referential integrity is maintained.
updated by @tig: 11/16/17 10:01:36AM

Archive and Purge

Jamroom Hosting

Given the size of our Comments, Discussion and Blog tables it would be advantageous to eliminate stale data. Considering this, we believe we can purge all records older than 6/1/2015. That would eliminate about 40% of the comments table. The idea of course would be to archive the data, delete and then reorganize the db.

Ideally JR hosting has tested tools that can be safely used to perform this task. This post is to present our intent and get the best advice on how to proceed.
updated by @tig: 02/14/18 10:12:36PM