[geeklog-devel] Re: Input From PJ of Groklaw

[Peter Roozemaal]

Hello all,

Tony Bibbs wrote:
> I recently was made aware of some issues Groklaw was having.  Seems as 
> though Stories and commennts come up missing sporadically.  I contacted 
> PJ and she says she's been working with Rakaz (she calls him MathFox).

Rakaz (Niels) is another person than me.

> on the issues. If anybody sees Rakaz in IRC they should bring this up 
> and see how we might help.  Also, any changes related to performance 
> that we have made we should share with Groklaw immediate so they might 
> modify their existing code (vinny I think I saw CVS commits from you in 
> particular related to performance and comments).

The database is the most serious performance bottleneck. We have 7?
webservers talking to a single database and Geeklog does a lot of
queries per page. We have a few stories with over 1000 comments!

Another issue is that regular expressions can take huge amounts of CPU
time when stories go large. PJ writes stories that don't allways fit in
64k, so I enlarged the bodytext field to mediumtext (16M). The regular
expression match in COM_extractLinks caused a time-out in stories that
had more that 50 links. (footnotes and back). BTW, we dropped the
"what's related" box.

> Aside from that PJ had a number of feature requests so I'm putting them 
> here so that they will be considered in either of the branches:
> 
[...]
> 
> Obviously some of these we've seen before.  Some we haven't.  I think 
> quite a few are low hanging fruit and others would take quite a bit of 
> work.  Nonetheless, I think we should consider these.  I know in a truly 
> democratic system (which this isn't necessarily) we give all users the 
> same say but I think we would be wise to at least address a few of these 
> ideas as I'd hate to see Groklaw change platforms.  To be clear, 
> changing platforms wasn't mentioned in the message she sent me but I 
> can't imagine it wasn't thought off considering they have content 
> disappearing.

I have been looking for a suitable platform, but couldn't find another
one that
  1. was open source
  2. had a decent security record
  3. could be installed easily
  4. had a good management interface
and I'ld hate to convert databases to a new environment.

> Also, this may be a good time to try recruiting more help off of 
> geeklog.net.  I was surprised at the help I got for Auth_Enterprise by 
> nagging people there.  I think if we create a request for help and list 
> some of these request (along with any prexisting issues on the project 
> site) and drop Groklaw's name we might get more help because....well, 
> nobody really wants to see SCO win this thing and helping, even if in 
> this indirect way, would probably motivate people.

Greetings,
	Peter.