Just to be absolutely clear, I __looove__ perlmonks. I am unworthy to tackle the slowness of PM, but I feel I must try.

From what I've read in earlier posts on this topic, the hardware on PM is great, but the code, while excellent and solid as a rock, does not take advantage of more recent speedy tricks.

Is this still true? Most of the stuff I read was from 2002. Is trying to speed up the Everything engine still the recommended approach to take? Is the code for PM available for me to look at? Can I find out about the environment in which PM is hosted? What server OS, web server, web server mods etc...? IE, if I wanted to duplicate the setup of PM for testing, could I find out how?

--Thanks!
Pileofrogs

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How Can I Help Make PM Faster?
by moritz (Cardinal) on Aug 22, 2008 at 17:11 UTC
    Wait.

    Really.

    Our gods are working on it. They have new hardware, and working on the migration.

    (It's not the engine that is slow, it's probably a bad mysql setup on freebsd or something).

[reply]

      Oh! Cool!

      Is there a place I can read about what's up? Mostly to satisfy my curiosity.

      --Pileofrogs

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        I can't really point you to a reference, I picked it in the chatterbox.
[reply]
Re: How Can I Help Make PM Faster?
by roboticus (Chancellor) on Aug 22, 2008 at 19:17 UTC
    frogpile:

    There was an interesting blog series by Krommatik that described some improvements. Even though you may want to wait for the hardware upgrade, you might be interested in reading the blogs, downloading the code, and start experimenting.

    ...rebooticus

    I really need to edit my spelling checker's dictionary! :^)

[reply]
[reply]

        ++

        Good reading!

[reply]
Re: How Can I Help Make PM Faster?
by cbrandtbuffalo (Deacon) on Aug 22, 2008 at 17:16 UTC
    I think the comments regarding the hardware are a bit dated since right now the current hardware is itself a bit dated. There are efforts under way right now to migrate to new hardware and we should see a performance jump then.

    Another thought has been to add some javascripty functionality similar to slashdot and use.perl.org to cut down on the full page loads the server has to do for comments, etc. See also this thread: Re: Could PerlMonks use some cash?
[reply]
      I've wondered for a long time why voting uses a full page reload rather than Ajax.
      --
      Marvin Humphrey
      Rectangular Research ― http://www.rectangular.com
[reply]
        Not everybody has javascript enabled, for various reasons:
        • Security
        • Performance - some scripts can be painfully slow
        • Browser doesn't support it (think of text browsers, speech output or whatever, or some mobile phones don't offer it)
        • Dislike of anything changing that should be static
        • Too much bad experience with javascript

        So if there were an Ajax thingy of that, it would surely be not compulsive.

[reply]

        I've wondered that for a couple months too. I figured they wanted to keep this written solely in Perl.

        I'm so adjective, I verb nouns!

        chomp; # nom nom nom
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Re: How Can I Help Make PM Faster?
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Aug 22, 2008 at 17:15 UTC

    Well, let's see. You could write your own CB client. You could write a bot to monitor CB and/or private messages and respond to them. You could create more stats based on the CB or XP, and publish them to another website. All of these should help keep critical information in the database cache, and thus make everything faster for everyone.

    *ahem*

    (sorry.)

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Re: How Can I Help Make PM Faster?
by dHarry (Abbot) on Aug 23, 2008 at 14:52 UTC
[reply]
      That sounds like a good idea in general, but read tye's node Re: Could PerlMonks use some cash? (naw) over in the thread Could PerlMonks use some cash?.

      As I read that, PM basically has funds more than adequate for its present situation. A great deal of funds would be necessary to have much of an impact at this point. I'm sure there would be a specific plea if there's a specific need.

      If anyone wants to add to PM's rainy day fund, I wouldn't discourage it. I'd probably take tye's advice for now, though, and donate any money I was going to donate to a Perl cause to something which needs the funds more immediately.

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Re: How Can I Help Make PM Faster?
by repellent (Priest) on Aug 23, 2008 at 03:00 UTC
    Phew! I thought it was just me noticing slowdowns from time to time.

    In the meantime, is there anything recommended that I can do to my "Settings Nodelet" to speed things up?

    Thanks.
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