Back from vacation
Got back from vacation a few days ago. I took a bike trip from Winnipeg to Toronto - pretty interesting. Anyway, when I got back I found the site wasn’t working too well: 503 and Rails errors. I did some cleanup of the log (1.5GB!) and session (too many for ls to list!) files. I’m looking into automating that stuff.
I sent a request to Dreamhost to get an explanation, and they said it wasn’t the bandwidth or the disk space I’m using, it’s the amount of CPU and memory that’s the problem. Lots and lots of little requests, many of which hit the database.
To cut down on the number of requests on the site, I’ve removed the star icons from style listings. Now, styles that have good ratings appear in bold and styles that have bad ratings appear translucent. I believe I’m going to tweak the algorithm to take into account popularity at some point in the future.
I removed the comments from individual styles’ pages, but there’s a link to show them again, along with an alternate link to the forum. The intention is that “reviews” should be posted on the style, but “questions or comments” should be posted in the forum to allow the author to respond. To help authors keep track of forum posts, some day I’ll create an RSS feed that includes all the posts in threads on their styles along with comments on the site.
All of this has had the effect of reducing the number of 503s from 5000 last Monday to 500 yesterday.
Some more changes are coming to improve performance, but due to the way Rails does caching I’ll need to make changes to Stylish as well. Speaking of which, the last major feature for 0.5, the ability to directly post styles written in Stylish to userstyles, is nearly complete and I’ll be posting a beta soon. After that, it’ll be mostly bug fixes and localizations before the final release. And after the final release, focus switches back to new features for userstyles.