in reply to super slow

How slow? Can you quantify it?

My observation is that the site's responsiveness varies dramatically, and unpredictably.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is much that can be done. Two factors:

  1. The framework on which the site is built — the "PerlMonks engine" — is intrinsically inefficient, in that the rendering of each page involves loading and evaling many little bits of perl code from a MySQL database.
  2. We're getting hosting services from a company which is donating it to us for free, so we're not really in a position to demand server upgrades and so on.

Of course, it's likely that there are places where the code can be made more efficient. You're welcome to join pmdev and submit patches.

Today's latest and greatest software contains tomorrow's zero day exploits.

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Re^2: super slow
by pryrt (Abbot) on Aug 19, 2024 at 14:53 UTC
    How slow? Can you quantify it? My observation is that the site's responsiveness varies dramatically, and unpredictably.

    For me, over the weekend as I was reading from my phone (whether on WiFi or on 5G network, so two different routes), I was often getting 15 or more seconds for page loads, and an estimated 10-20% of attempts ended in the browser timing out the connection (which I think is at 30sec, on my phone browser) rather than getting the page. And during one stretch, I was getting consistent timeout, such that even IsItDownRightNow agreed that the site was down.

    Today, it's been better than that (less than a couple seconds to load a page). But, despite the uptime improvements compared to the April outages, I still frequently get at least a few times per week when all I get are timeouts when I try multiple times in a row; when I move on to something else, and then come back an hour or two later, it's usually back to responding.

[reply]

      Hmm, Chatterbot regularly accesses the site 24/7 anyway. I think i could log the access time in the future.

      Edit: I started logging today (Tuesday 20th August, 15:00 UTC). It will take me a few days until i have time (and enough data) to write and test the code that generates the visual outputs (PM and off-site).

      PerlMonks XP is useless? Not anymore: XPD - Do more with your PerlMonks XP
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        That's a great idea. Would it be pretty easy to make a page that shows site responsiveness over time, say the last month?

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Re^2: super slow
by Danny (Chaplain) on Aug 16, 2024 at 22:59 UTC
    I will look into doing some sort of benchmark. I think people using the site (at least it's true for me) get the feeling that it's much more laggy than a typical site. It would be interesting to try and quantify that. As far as optimizing the code, I wouldn't mind looking into it, but there are much more qualified people here.
[reply]

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