I'm going to try posting some work related stuff here (though no guarantees that I will do it consistently) so that anyone who cares can kind of catch up on what's going on behind the scenes with the forums. Questions like 'Why in the hell were the forums down for 2 hours yesterday" usually have good answers!
Sprechenzie which, yesterday the forums were down because we launched 2 major internal code/db changes which effected the flexi forums engine in many places. The crux of the changes for yesterday's launch were made on the GameFaqs side by Jeff Veasey to integrate GF users with the URS authorization system used by Gamespot and MP3.
The second major change was a major optimization in the DB structure which eliminated many unnecessary user id lookups (they were in a seperate table - now merged with BOARDUSER). I had made this change several weeks ago and had branched the code so that Jeff could make his changes in the same branch and we could launch it all at once to reduce hardship on the users. Anyway, this is all up and now and the launch went relatively well considering how many files were changed. Only a few minor hiccups on the gs side (post count not updating and some admin tools didn't work).
In other news, I have just completed adding message and topic full text searching to the forums. We have not enabled this up until now for two reasons:
1 - because full text search is extremely performance intensive
2 - because there has been a constant list of features and additions on my plate which took priority (journals -hardware/sports blogs - old bugs/forums features - getting flexi forums API ready for broader use - setting up MP3 forums - memcache and other performance optimizations to name a few)
To get the performance issue out of the way, I had made great strides in adding performance playroom to the forums recently - particularly through the use of an in memory caching solution which JSD and Scotty B discovered called 'memcached'. This usefull open source tidbit has helped forums performance immensely, not to mention the rest of the gs site (big thanks to Danga Interactive for memcached!)
And so the time has come to get message and topic full text search working... JSD came up with a groovy idea to help make this possible (without negatively affecting forums performance) by having a dedicated server handle the queries. The server will be a replication slave and I will add fulltext indexes to the appropriate fields only on the slave - this should work nicely.. though we'll see about replication lag. We will be bringing the forums down for a few minutes later this eve to get the slave set up - after that we'll test and see how it goes - I forsee no problems... should be up and live by friday.
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