fast?

The site should feel faster today. Yesterday my Dad (who is also a programmer) and I collaborated on doing some serious tracing of the website. We used a kernel analysis tool called strace(1) to check each and every system call that the server was making for each page request.

Using the output of this debugging, we were able to find some serious performance bottlenecks on the server, and I took action against some of them this morning. The server is quite zippy right now and we'll see how it goes through the day.

Also - another thing that came from the debugging session was that I have developed a strategy to increase the cache of the hard disks that runs the server. I will be making those changes during the day today, but interuptions should be minimal.

Dave

One change that you might notice is that at the moment, Garden Terms and Garden Watchdog lookup are not happening automatically within threads (you notice that all those hyperlinks are missing).

I had to do this, at least temporarily, in order to satisfy one bottleneck that we found. I hope that bring those feature back sometime soon.

Dave

flying for me!!!

zoom zooom! :)

It's lots faster for me here at work. The link to the daylilies database doesn't work is that one of the things you have disabled for the time being?

TURBO!

mystic: Is it working now? If you find any other errors please let me know.

dave

Much faster! How do I spell relief? S P E E D !

Yes it is Dave. Thanks

Much faster! Pages are loading at almost their old speed...BC(before crash)

WOW! S P E E E E E D!!!!

Yes, it's good to go f a s t again. Thank you Dave

It´s going round here :-), no loading problems!!!

Whoooosh - nothing but net. Great!

Yep...I must say, MUCH better. Quite zippy. Photos load fast too.

I just uploaded a 120K photo in the grass forum and I started counting as soon as I hit "preview". It took 9 seconds for the photo to upload :) Not bad.

I had to log on 3 times to get a decent dial-up connection, but it is running now. I get ssooooooooooo frustrated with my isp and there isn't anything I can do - they tell me it's because we have old telephone lines, but the phone company is offering DSL on those lines, so I don't know who to believe. acckkkk. Sorry for the vent. Good work Dave and Dad.

It's great Dave.

Lickety split here. Never been this fast!

Kathleen...I get the same run-around that you do...old telephone lines...Dave....what do you say? Are they telling us the truth? Jo

It may be true; they strung fiber-optic cables all over our neighborhood just last year.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/fiber-optic.htm

Great job once again, Dave. Works grrreeeeeeeeaaaat!

Roadrunner..depending on several factors, it could be true. The wire in your house, the cable outside, all the various connections in between the central office and your house and the distance between the CO and your house. (I'm in the telecom business...been doing cabling and phone system/voice mail system installation for over 10 years now) Sorry :( Best thing to do if it's available and you can afford to get it is get a cable modem or DSL.

Dave, thanks, and thanks again for all you do. i posted a thread on GW looking for someone from a trade i went to.... i got a "friendly reminder" and the thread pulled. the trade was 3/29, and there is only one page of exchanges visible so i couldn't find her that way. it reminded me of HOW WONDERFUL YOU ARE! and why i only go there every few months or so, only to look at the local trade info....

Dave, I noticed the change in speed yesterday. Zipping along! It's great

Believe it or not, when we had dial-up, we noticed a big difference in speed when we used a high-speed phone line between the wall jack and the computer. We got it on clearance at Wal-Mart, and were surprised by the difference.