Chat has become weirdly slow

[Myrnalene]

I want to apologize for the tone of my post #7. It was out of line.

I stand by all the other posts I made pointing out how McNutty was wrong about the other thingie, though.

[Myrnalene]

I have no idea what may be causing this, but chat has been blissfully lag free for me this morning. This may be a passing thing, so I will post if it starts up again.

[Exy]

I have no idea what may be causing this, but chat has been blissfully lag free for me this morning. This may be a passing thing, so I will post if it starts up again.

Yeah this.

[Myrnalene]

No change for me since Friday - maybe this problem has cleared up for good?

[What Exit?]

If it acts up again for more than a few hours, we'll try the drastic but reversible step of returning to vanilla php AJAX Chat and see if that helps or not. If it does not help, I think it will point to a fatal flaw in the abandoned spaghetti code that Ajax Chat appears to be. Though I am still suspicious of network issues beyond our control playing havoc with the chat code as the problems are so inconsistent, even between the heaviest users of chat.

I have not seen any good alternate chat solutions that integrate into the board. If anyone sees them, please post them here.

[McNutty]

I have been noticing that on occasion, arbitrary HTTP requests to the board take a long time -- like 30 seconds just for viewing a thread or something. Most likely this is simply a result of more PHP requests coming in than we're configured to handle simultaneously, forcing some to wait. This is a minor annoyance when browsing the board (and it gets more and more annoying the more traffic the board gets -- the right solution will be to move to a server with more RAM so we can handle more requests simultaneously), but due to the way chat is written, if it happens on one of the "/forum/chat.php" requests that updates the message window, the whole chat interface becomes unresponsive. It's happened to me in chat a couple of times and it's very annoying.

Since two-thirds of the requests to the server now consist of browsers checking for new chat messages every 7 seconds, you could say that at least some of chat's performance problems are caused by ... chat.

[What Exit?]

Chat got busy just now, and the Update function took 22 seconds to free up.

[binks]

Laggy last night and today for me.