root log: February 2005

Februrary 3, 2005: Hello everyone, remember me? As much as I can be, I'm back.

Today we hunted down and destroyed some of E2's bad index problems, which has led to performance enhancements across the board.

MySQL 4.1 - We're on 4.1 now. The list of improvements is large, but it is just overall better.

message (dbtable) - The index now takes into account the majority of message table operations (showmessages, truely), but has dropped the other indexes to keep the optimizer from getting confused. If this is a serious performance problem with other message table items (and we'll know if it'll show up in the slow.log), we'll re-arrange them. Even my inbox (3k messages big), only takes something like .03 seconds to fish messages out of.

searchwords (dbtable) - For some obtuse reason I indexed the tables way, way wrong, and realized that MySQL can't collate indexes. We now have a 20-char multicolumn index, after which I haven't seen a search with 5+ words take more than a second. Works for me

links (dbtable) - The old firmlink index was brain-damaging the index I put in the other day, so now it's all a lot faster

Those are the big three performance problems as I see them right now. The next thing I'm going to fix up is the new writeups hell. There are some really, really easy optimizations that we can make to it that don't involve freezing data structures like I'm doing right now. This will also fix the editor nodelet vs. real nodelet lag.

Seems like the MySQL upgrade did some minor collateral damage. Specifically, anything with date/time stamps seems affected -- Message Inbox/Gab Central, the admin "security logs", etc. Strangely not everyone was affected (or noticed) even though it all seems like server-side operations. I implemented OldMiner's patch for Message Inbox (also in Gab Central) and put a quick 'n' dirty patch on the security logs.

As well, the Crypt is not clearing out deleted nodes and writeups. They've been accumulating there since February 3rd. This means that deleted writeups are not entering users' Node Heavens. (A random sample of writeups waiting in the Crypt confirms this.) These writeups are not lost, they're just stuck in purgatory. JayBonci or someone similarly adept will have to help them to move on.

Other reported issues include breakage to "Add rooms" in Gab Central and the loading of new user images on home nodes. Both seem to work for me, but the investigation continues....

2005.2.25 kthejoker reports: The error with user images is if you change Content-Types - you replace a jpeg with a gif, it creates a 0 byte jpeg file instead of deleting the old one. Then when you try to switch back to jpeg - no go, and now you've got a 0 byte gif to boot.

StrawberryFrog says e2 clients like matbox and frogbox, and java chatterbox were all broken by the timestamp format change