[photon]

Originally Posted by frinkprof

Photon, I will agree that some of the responses do have an edge to them, but I don't think that you should take it as a commentary on the work you're doing and your efforts. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do sense a bit of sensitivity that way.

It's not sensitivity to my efforts, it's sensitivity to outright condescension; that someone would feel the need to give me unsolicited opinions and advice about my choices.

If you're walking down the street (not you specifically, the royal you), do you walk up to someone a few houses down and out of the blue tell them that their choice of house design was poor, or that their job doesn't pay them enough, or that the way they run their life is ill advised? Of course not, I wouldn't give that kind of advice unless it was solicited or if I knew the person extremely well, otherwise it'd be pretty condescending.

Or in the other case just outright whining, everyone's sensitive to that.

Originally Posted by frinkprof

I can appreciate that some of the features were disabled on a temporary basis only, but many of them are disabled often (busy times of year such as trade deadline, etc.), nevermind that the crashes and load times that spur these measures happen frequently in the first place. The loading and crashes are the main source of most people's frustration, I'm sure.

It's a very common question in scaling infrastructure; how far to build out for. You can spent to the moon and make sure your servers can handle every eventuality, but much more common is to build for the 95% of the time and just accept that there'll be some times when service will be degraded. Especially when the service is free and not mission critical.

The more recent pauses and load times are different, have a different cause, and not what we want.

Originally Posted by frinkprof

To clarify with the post history searches, I mean the search that is performed when you click on a user's name and the option to view that user's past posts. It used to return, I believe, 5 times the number of results than they do now. Noticed that change a couple weeks ago maybe.

Ah ok, yeah I was reviewing some settings and notice that value was unreasonably high. There's no use in returning huge numbers of posts in such a search; searching by clicking on a user's name will be because you're trying to find a very recent post for that user. No need to have 500 results, even 100 is tons.

If one wants to go back further looking for a post for a user, they're probably looking for something specific so the advanced search feature can be used for that.

Originally Posted by frinkprof

Also, I did indeed PM Bingo with my post above, although I do have to echo the concerns of others above that the owner doesn't peruse the Help/Suggestions section of the forum, especially in light of a persistent technical issue such as this one. Surely you shouldn't be left to answer for everything. I haven't received a reply yet.

Bingo wouldn't have anything more to add to the technical issues, he's already asked me what I need and I've told him it's all already in place and I'm answering for it because I'm the best one to answer for it.

Originally Posted by frinkprof

I'm sure the new servers will be great and all, but that it has gotten to this point (and likely will again), raises some questions.

Well the answer to that question is pretty easy, until sureLoss posted this thread (and other feedback) and I started to do some investigations, I didn't know the performance issues were as significant as they were, so it simply wasn't high on my priority list.

We don't have a dedicated operations team doing load testing and constant monitoring analysis and making 5 year plans for scaling requirements (which is what's required to not get to this point), so there's going to be times when I'm responding instead of being pro-active. At this level, feeling entitled to not getting to this situation isn't reasonable IMO.

I would cut my rate to $125 an hour though if people want to hire me part time to be more pro-active