Mailing List Archive

Last-minute changes before announcement.
As for the links to large queries like the "5000" recent changes, it
occurs to me that the user can get any number he wants by composing
the URL himself, and anyone who actually wants a list of 5000 things
will probably know how to do that, so I removed all the big-number
links entirely, logged in and otherwise.

Also, Magnus showed me a SQL trick I'd never seen before ("order by
rand()"...wouldn't have thought of that) that enabled a much faster
implementation of RandomPage, and I thought that was worth changing
before the announcement and isolated enough that it's unlikely to
affect anything else in the code.

Those changes are installed and test well under the bots, so I'm going
to go ahead and announce the transition on the main list and the front
page to try to get some realistic user testing.

0
Re: Last-minute changes before announcement. [ In reply to ]
lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:

>As for the links to large queries like the "5000" recent changes, it
>occurs to me that the user can get any number he wants by composing
>the URL himself, and anyone who actually wants a list of 5000 things
>will probably know how to do that, so I removed all the big-number
>links entirely, logged in and otherwise.
>
>Also, Magnus showed me a SQL trick I'd never seen before ("order by
>rand()"...wouldn't have thought of that) that enabled a much faster
>implementation of RandomPage, and I thought that was worth changing
>before the announcement and isolated enough that it's unlikely to
>affect anything else in the code.
>
>Those changes are installed and test well under the bots, so I'm going
>to go ahead and announce the transition on the main list and the front
>page to try to get some realistic user testing.
>
>0
>

I've been extracting data from the server logs, and graphing it in Excel.

The removal of the big count options seems to have occured after server
timestamp 20020714152016.
This _seems_ to have made things better, but I can't be sure, as the
system has been fairly lightly loaded since them, and it's difficult to
find periods of matching load.

Could some more people please load the beta test site some more, as I
can't generate enough load by myself on my 512k link.

Thanks.

Neil