New feature: caching

General Discussions
#1

I can honestly say I appreciate the lengthy posts you guys write. Those huge threads took rather long to load and my brand new VPS was struggling on those pages, with 250-900ms CPU time per page load. Obviously something had to be optimized. As some of you may know, SMF doesn’t cache messages, it simple interprets every message as if it has seen it for the first time: all UBB tags have to be found, verified, transformed, etc, using a vast array of regexes. Needless to say, long pages took some time to process, resulting in the slowdown of the entire forum.

Long story short: I wrote a caching layer.

The forum should be much faster now, on some pages the CPU time was reduced by a factor of 10.

Please report any anomalies in this thread.

#2

Thanks for keeping this forum great Riven!

#3

I prefer to think of it as making SMF suck less… :emo:

#4

There isn’t any other good forum software you could use?

EDIT: Also thanks for the new feature :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

I like phpBB

#6

Just curious, why not switch to SMF 2.x ? Its suppose to be a lot better.

#7

If you look at the sourcecode of SMF 2.x, you’ll see that it’s not much better. It’s an incompetent bunch overthere. Besides, I have way too much invested in the current source (hundreds of tiny modifications).

#8

Yea, I agree with Riven there. Nice one.

I’ve looked at source codes for various php forums, phpBB, smf, etc. and it all sucks. Its a spaghetti clustermess from hell. It is beyond me why these systems are so popular.

#9

You could probably do a better job making the code better, faster than they can. You got nobody to argue with about implementations :stuck_out_tongue:

I really enjoy all your small tweaks :slight_smile:

#10

In the end I’d have spent months to get the functionality SMF already has. What would be the point? It might reduce the server load from 0.40 to 0.04, but nobody would notice.

#11

Personally I think all old style forums suck; including SMF, phpBB, and similar. Far too much visual noise, navigation and other cruft around them. I much prefer layouts like Reddit and Stack Overflow, which give a much more fluid and streamlined feel.

However building something with half as much functionality as any of those takes time.

But congratulations on getting caching! The board feels much faster then it used to.

#12

[x] StackOverflow excels at Q&A with very high signal to noise ratio.
[x] Reddit excels at rapid discussion with very low signal to noise ratio.
[x] Forums excel at creating a community with moderate signal to noise ratio.

Converting JGO to either StackOverflow or Reddit style, would instantly vaporate the community.

#13

I still love SMF ;D
Stack Overflow is good, especially when you searching for the right answer because it’ll tell you which one and let other replies into black hole. But still I prefer SMF. It’s not broke after all~

#14

I was mainly thinking out loud, I don’t seriously think JGO should drop SMF any time soon. I just really don’t like the mass of categories you get on these old style boards (in general, not in particular aimed at JGO), and they are rarely that ajaxy. Lots of modern alternatives tend to allow you to do just as much, with less page changes and clicks.