Geeklog Forums

Groklaw just got slashdotted and seems to have exercised the comment mechanism of Geeklog to exhaustion. From Groklaw:

"By the way, we found out how many comments we can have before the software sinks, on the last story. It seems 1,181 is our natural limit, so please don't add any more comments to that story. We are holding on by our fingertips, while MathFox works his wonders. It's never happened before. Remember when we had to move away from Radio Userland because we were having too many comments for the software? Well, again we have so many comments the software is groaning. Here, we can make the necessary changes to be able to grow right where we stand."

- Andy

OUCH!!!!

Sad to see. Groklaw is the best testbed for GL. I wonder if MathFox ever pokes his nose into these forums?

i dare say the issue is not so much geeklog but a limit to how fast php can loop though the recordset before a time out. slashdot dosent even get that many coments to a story

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glFusion - Technology Fused with Style - www.gllabs.org

I'll have to agree with trinity, 1381 seems like an odd number for an upper limit. No pun intended. It was probably overload with php/MySQL and not enough horse power to:

1) service http requests and
2) run comments.php concurrently

But this would be something interesting to debug. When ever I look at my stats on runtime, mysqld has used the most by a factor of 400x, with HTTPD using almost nothing.

I chat with mathfox regularly and just stumbled apon this page, he has said that the geeklog used on Groklaw has been modified to allow for the high volume of comments as well as the large articles. the upper limit on the number of posts is not a fixed number but rather the maximum amount of HTML that will fit in the servers cache (so many MB i forget the number he mentioned) when it is generating the page.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050509145744287
this story has the most number of comments (1247) of any article on groklaw to date. not only are there a lot but they were being posted at quite a rate.