Be more faster!

December 13, 2007 8:53 AM

Did the recent changes to "Recent Activity" make it really inefficient? It takes forever to bring up that page now.

I'm seeing 11 seconds or so to bring up that page. Not render time, just "waiting for www.metafilter.com". Pretty much every other page on the site is 1-2 seconds. It didn't used to be slow like this, so I'm wondering if something broke. Like maybe the change to include more data is slowing it down, or adding the feature that allows you to remove things.

posted by smackfu to Bugs at 8:53 AM (29 comments total)

I've noticed this as well. I would rather have it load faster and have to wade through bitch fests in threads that should be dead than have it load slow with the ability to delete those threads. It's a nice feature but I haven't even used it once yet.
posted by caddis at 9:04 AM on December 13, 2007

It does take an age. I was wondering how the rest of the site manages to stay so quick while it's doing its thing: does it run on a seperate DB or something?
posted by bonaldi at 9:06 AM on December 13, 2007

I think we can all agree that this is homunculus's fault.
posted by Plutor at 9:07 AM on December 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Ditto.
posted by languagehat at 9:10 AM on December 13, 2007

My, has Beckett taught you nothing?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:15 AM on December 13, 2007

Beckett taught me about Krapp.
posted by cgc373 at 9:26 AM on December 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

It's probably because we have to crawl through queries going back a year for ask mefi (as opposed to 1 month as we were doing before).

How about less than 25 threads? How about just 10-15? I only seem to track about 5 threads at any one time before everything is just repeats of old unchanged stuff.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:29 AM on December 13, 2007

Shoot, I can't even post a comment anymore from my Blackberry. I see previews but all I get is a 404 error when I hit "post."
posted by breezeway at 9:35 AM on December 13, 2007

Well, obviously posting works for MeTa, but the issue's still there on MeFi proper. I think. I'll go check again. Sorry for the derail/test post.
posted by breezeway at 9:37 AM on December 13, 2007

Still no dice. I guess I can just continue to haunt MeTa, but I'm much more constructive and engaging over there.

Forgive my intrusion. For what it's worth, Recent Activity now takes forever to load in my BlackBerry, but I just figured it was my service.
posted by breezeway at 9:42 AM on December 13, 2007

I know I don't need 25 threads tracked, but I like finding out somebody has contributed to something that I thought was dead. If there were a way to display 10 threads at a time, would that affect the lookup process? Could we have 10 pages with a link at the bottom to older and newer, as we do with My Comments, etc.?
posted by cgc373 at 9:52 AM on December 13, 2007

Can we just get a box where we type in the SQL statement for what we want to see, and then the results get displayed in a pretty, AJAXy grid below? We promise not to do anything nasty.
posted by blue_beetle at 9:57 AM on December 13, 2007

It's not slow for me, but I use "Remove from Activity" pretty frequently
posted by Pants! at 10:02 AM on December 13, 2007

I am not so sure that it has to do with the change to AskMe. That was a while ago but the slowdown is recent. It seems to have started about the time that the feature to remove threads from Recent Activity was implemented.
posted by caddis at 10:11 AM on December 13, 2007

The remove from activity feature doesn't affect the speed of RA in any significant way. There's an extra query to grab the ID of every thread you've hidden, but that's negligible.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:18 AM on December 13, 2007

I haven't noticed it any slower. I just wanted to say (again) how great the 'recent activity' page is. I use it all the time. Thanks!
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 10:22 AM on December 13, 2007

Seemed much slower for me as well, but I thought it was just my service. Faster would be nicer, and I'm ok with less recent threads shown.
posted by mitzyjalapeno at 10:39 AM on December 13, 2007

I get the connection in ~ 2 seconds and the page HTML in ~ 3 seconds. On a refresh the page doesn't render until the linked Javascript files are all loaded, after about 8 seconds, but once they're cached I get the page in just over 3 seconds.
posted by nicwolff at 10:44 AM on December 13, 2007

Could we go down to 20 first? I sometimes do have about that, and I live on RA.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 11:19 AM on December 13, 2007

Eleven seconds. Versus five seconds.
This is proof that Moore's Law applies to patience.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:34 AM on December 13, 2007

Just did some testing, and found the slowdown was related to the new AskMe timeframe. And if most of your activity is over at Ask, it is going to affect the speed of your Recent Activity more than someone hanging out in MeFi most of the time. I think I improved the query a bit just now, so you might see if it's faster for you.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:51 AM on December 13, 2007

I started noticing the slowdown when the change to 25 threads/full month/full year was implemented. It may have gotten worse lately though..

How about less than 25 threads? How about just 10-15? I only seem to track about 5 threads at any one time before everything is just repeats of old unchanged stuff.

It should be more than 10 for sure, but 25 might be overkill.


I have the same question as bonaldi, how is the load balanced? That might be the reason for the problem.. Anyway, a brief wait is a small price to pay for the improvement in functionality.
posted by Chuckles at 11:52 AM on December 13, 2007

I'm happy with a slower, more featureful Recent Activity. It'll also discourage me from checking every few seconds, which can only be a good thing.
posted by grouse at 12:45 PM on December 13, 2007

I think I improved the query a bit just now, so you might see if it's faster for you.

Much improved, now it's down to 3 seconds or so.
posted by smackfu at 12:56 PM on December 13, 2007

yay, hugs for pb! hugs all around!
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:40 PM on December 13, 2007

This will hugwell.
posted by grouse at 1:44 PM on December 13, 2007

pb! hugs all around!

(he's just joking this time pb)
posted by smackfu at 1:45 PM on December 13, 2007

It's probably because we have to crawl through queries going back a year for ask mefi (as opposed to 1 month as we were doing before).
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Well, stop doing that."

I was getting the slooooooooooooooooooooow loading of that page too and I have almost nothing from AskMe on the page. It seems to be fine now, though. You know, just to add some irrelevant data to the discussion.
posted by dg at 7:44 PM on December 13, 2007

Suddenly I'm getting 15-20 second load times of the recent activity page. It loads, but then 10-15 seconds pass before I can scroll.
posted by Kattullus at 10:52 AM on December 14, 2007