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Slashdotted again...

By Cosimo Streppone. Tuesday, 21. July 2009, 17:42:52

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My Opera was on Slashdot again today!

This time is Hallvord's fault :-)

Yesterday he wrote a blog post about an epic Javascript fail that today was picked up by several major web sites in Norway and in the U.S. and mostly probably elsewhere.

We realized there was something strange going on because of the unusual load and number of requests on our front-end servers. Analyzing the logs, it was clear that Hallvord's post was getting lots of pageviews per second, mostly from Slashdot, but also from Reddit and from the norwegian online magazine Digi.

The blog post was immediately put into our list of "hot content" to be cached, and everything was fine again in a couple of minutes. The idea for the future is to be able to automatically detect such high number of requests, at least for blog posts, and automatically cache them. Another alternative could be to enable blog post caching by default, but this should be done very carefully, because blog pages contain dynamic content that usually depends on the visiting user and on the user who is the "owner" of the page.

We'll see...

Continuous integration10 million pictures!

Comments

Haruka aka Seremel 21. July 2009, 17:55

Is Hallvord part/full-time stress tester now :jester:

Furie 21. July 2009, 18:23

Jesus. I'm not commenting there. Too many anonymous morons who think that Opera costs money, is run by ads and isn't standards compliant.

I can't believe a company would brazenly do that then try to sell the product to the company they're screwing over. Is there a lawsuit going on over it now?

Furie 21. July 2009, 18:27

Blog caching as standard is a bad idea. The sidebars still go screwy sometimes and show old content, meaning we wouldn't be able to edit visible whispers etc out of our posts quickly. Also this caching thing makes it a real problem to change things on a phone.

Quinnuendo 21. July 2009, 21:37

Read the story. Was interesting. Am with Furie. The comments there were quite ... ehm weird.

And yes, too much cashing is a problem.

clean 21. July 2009, 22:53

Yep - not a fan of caching. Well ... it's only really a (minor) pain when I have to manually refresh a page to see any changes I made to my post/s.

* sigh* Pressing F5 is such a drama ... :rolleyes: :wink:

Or am I getting the concept of caching wrong? :confused:

Although ... is auto-caching of a post that's getting massive amounts of hits possible? Not the entire blog ... just the post?

Tamil 21. July 2009, 22:58

Originally posted by Haruka aka Seremel:

Is Hallvord part/full-time stress tester now

bugscout 22. July 2009, 07:17

how about caching all, new or editing post clears cache,

you can exclude parts of the sidebar that change dynamically like recent visitors.

if you do that well the servers and visitors will love you.

cstrep 22. July 2009, 07:50

@Furie: sidebar is "screwey"? What is the problem exactly? When you write a new blog post, depending on the sidebar content, you will probably not see your new post in the sidebar "latest posts" component right away. It will show some time later, though. That is how it's supposed to be working :smile:

@bugscout: When you have either recent visitors or polls enabled in your sidebar, caching is automatically excluded. In the former case because we have to track visitors. In the latter, because the poll component depends on the visiting user, not the "owner" user.
Recent visitors will show with a bit of delay.

We think those are fairly good compromises if they allow us to keep the site running smoothly. Anyway, feedback is always welcome, as we're trying to continuously improve.

Furie 22. July 2009, 08:30

It's just that sometimes it shows old content when new content should be there (with latest comments being the largest culprit), or content that shouldn't be shown. For example, the photo slideshow shows friends only or private photos to people who shouldn't be able to access them. I think it's been reported by the guy who told me.

Chas4 25. July 2009, 16:29

I read every comment on there (responded to a few), they had some funny comments and a lot of repeats (Dell is not in good shape in the comments)

Here it is on Google:
http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=%22Most+expensive+javascript+ever%3F%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

It sure did make its way around the web

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