Sabr Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 EDIT: Oops looks like someone had put in a manual board time offset to counteract the incorrect system time manually, by 57 seconds... How random is that. I have this mental image of somebody logging in every day, working out how 'wrong' the server was and updating the board time offset accordingly- brilliant! Lol - yep, that would be me! I added on extra minutes to the forum time every week. But I'm so glad to find out that this is now fixed. Thanks for your effort and time ComplexMind. It is much appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mifki Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 mebster, stop being a patronizing {censored}. you know i have a helpful side and i dont need coaxing into behaving (with your needless editing of posts which might i add again is entirely out of line). Anyway, good job on fixing the server, its good to see the site behaving normally after so many months of on/off periods, i still would recomend spliltting the database into two sections as this will improve search results dramaticaly (so many times i have searched and only got hits for 9 month old topics about where to find a dvd) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ComplexMind Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 Anyway, good job on fixing the server, its good to see the site behaving normally after so many months of on/off periods, i still would recomend spliltting the database into two sections as this will improve search results dramaticaly (so many times i have searched and only got hits for 9 month old topics about where to find a dvd) Hey, no problem, it's nice to have a little time to look at it for a change The search problem must be something else entirely, there is no reason for the search to be crappy with the Sphinx indexing system. One of our devs is looking into the Sphinx setup for me and I will ask him to take a really close look at it again tomorrow if I don't have time to look myself... Splitting the database (I assume you mean just the big tables) would make no difference whatsoever to search speeds or accuracy. None at all. Feel free to provide me with some search terms/results you have difficulty in believing. I will run them by hand against mysql if I have to M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mifki Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 didnt mean speed or accuracy by splitting the tables, i meant archving all the old content which hasnt been replied to in over 6 months and placing it in an archived section of the forum which isnt being indexed or crawled for search results, that way the search function has less old useless data and would be able to present more relevant searches (although there is an option to search by date iirc) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mebster Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 Kiko, you really are uncapable of taking a joke aren't you. But yet more than eager to dish them out. Oh well. The forum does seem a lot faster so thanks for the update. But will this correct the error messages also? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mifki Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 Not really, its just that there wasnt a after the good behaviour bit, hence it isnt a joke (i seem to miss on sarcasm if it doesnt have a blatant ). Anyways not worth spamming this thread up for minor differences. Now all we need is a new theme (or re-enabling the rhasphody modern theme, which is enabled for admins but not for normal users) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ComplexMind Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 didnt mean speed or accuracy by splitting the tables, i meant archving all the old content which hasnt been replied to in over 6 months and placing it in an archived section of the forum which isnt being indexed or crawled for search results, that way the search function has less old useless data and would be able to present more relevant searches (although there is an option to search by date iirc)That is exactly why we use sphinx, so we don't have to complicate the database structure for what is actually not that large a database... Check it outIt completely offloads free text searching from mysql and is lightning fast. We use it on many sites as a general solution to this problem. The question is, is the Sphinx index data accurate and complete? Thats what I am trying to verify at the moment.But will this correct the error messages also?Well it seems to have made a difference but only time will tell since the errors have always been intermittent. The servers are definitely running more smoothly and pages being served faster after a little TLC :)If the errors return I have a few more tricks up my sleeve yet... M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hagar Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 It may be a peculiarity of this site that a lot of searches will be short strings of digits such as 10.4.11 or 10.5.2 these currently appear to return nothing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mebster Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 Not really, its just that there wasnt a after the good behaviour bit, hence it isnt a joke (i seem to miss on sarcasm if it doesnt have a blatant ).Did you actually read the post properly. The forum seems super quick now. Loading in <1 sec on a 8MB connection compared to the 5-10 seconds at times before. I guess you upgraded the 2xmac minis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
socal swimmer Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 why don't you implement a google-based search engine? Everyone uses google to search this site anyways... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ComplexMind Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 It may be a peculiarity of this site that a lot of searches will be short strings of digits such as 10.4.11 or 10.5.2 these currently appear to return nothing?Nice one Hagar, examples are always good A manual db query for the string '10.5.2' yields 374 matching posts. There is definitely a problem with the sphinx index. maybe a full rebuild is in order - I'll do some more digging... Thanks!M.Did you actually read the post properly.The forum seems super quick now. Loading in Hehe yeah, the site is definitely rocking at the moment. And nope, the mac minis are still doing a great job ;)In fact we had them tested down at LINX (London Internet eXchange) on a state of the art network testing rig and they blew all predictions out of the water. Lets just say they were quite happy at 450Mb/s - more details to follow on a Fubra blog post when I get time to write it all up :PM.why don't you implement a google-based search engine?Everyone uses google to search this site anyways...Because if our search was working properly, it would be just as good if not better working from the primary data source Google doesn't have to know everything does it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orea Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 site seems to load quickly over edge on my iphone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted January 3, 2008 Author Share Posted January 3, 2008 The site is ultra fast now...crazy amazing speed. This is the fastest its been since I joined. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ComplexMind Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 site seems to load quickly over edge on my iphone That's because I re-enabled keepalives on the server. It is of most benefit for people on high-latency connections (iPhones) and long-distance visitors <_ they were disabled because the site got hammered quite badly one day and keepalives don help when you are under siege. never turned back on afterwards until tonight.> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mebster Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 That's because I re-enabled keepalives on the server. It is of most benefit for people on high-latency connections (iPhones) and long-distance visitors They were disabled because the site got hammered quite badly one day and keepalives don't help when you are under siege. They were never turned back on afterwards until tonight. Well all I have to say is Thank You. Stick around please. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted January 3, 2008 Author Share Posted January 3, 2008 Yeah, I like you Mark Stay around! pcwiz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erbic Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 Well, this is nice. I had just resigned myself to having to deal with constant lag, too. Socal... Sphinx is a hell of a lot better than Google site search when it works properly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mifki Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 /me gives pcwiz a tissue to wipe the shiit off his nose Yeah, at least theres an admin who does stuff now lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suhail Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 Nice work Mark, Site seems much faster now Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ComplexMind Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 we're at the bottom of the search problem too, fixing it right now. In the time being I have enabled the slow search method which takes a few seconds but does actually return results. Fast search service should be resumed very shortly M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ComplexMind Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 OK, here's the situation with search. There are basically several options available for how the search query string is evaluated by the search engine: http://www.sphinxsearch.com/doc.html#searching Previously the site was hard coded to use the extended search method, which provides some pretty sophisticated pattern matching ala Google. Unfortunately though, this engine seems to barf on queries containing strings like '10.5.1' and return no results at all. Using the literal string operator (ie surrounding the search term with "double quotes" ) does not resolve the issue either. It might be that this is a bug with the sphinx search client, but it's hard to tell... So in the time being what I have done is switch from extended match into 'any' match mode which still provides result weighting but removes many of the more advanced search syntaxes. But it does return searchs containing versions strings perfectly! I'm guessing that people would rather have the ability to search with version numbers than accomodate the advanced search syntax so I have left it in 'any' mode until we work out whether extended mode can be made to work better. If anybody is a keen user of the advanced searching stuff then shout up. In the time being, we'll keep looking into it. Hope this helps explain what has been going on. M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
socal swimmer Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 well could you implement an option where you could choose the advanced search engine, or the more effective one? if the search works well now, thats great! well actually..... search for "Motherboard buying guide": Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ComplexMind Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 well could you implement an option where you could choose the advanced search engine, or the more effective one? if the search works well now, thats great! well actually..... search for "Motherboard buying guide": about the new error, see here http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...mp;#entry564121 I just fixed that also. Hopefully the search engine should be much more stable now. Also, we have already discussed the possibility of giving choice of search engine query matching logic... If this feature would be desirable then shout up and I'll see what I can do... M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onemanstrash Posted January 4, 2008 Share Posted January 4, 2008 Search should just be removed all together from this board, it basically ignores the word you're searching for and spits out random results. I used to use the search function an insanelymac but I would basically get back everything in my results. So I read somewhere on here a while back a good search function in google that helps me find everything I need in insanelymac. I don't know how I found anything without it. go to google ( I think it's on the web) and type: p5w+10.5.1+site:insanelymac.com and BAMM all the results with my search items comes up within the site. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hagar Posted January 4, 2008 Share Posted January 4, 2008 Yup, onemanstrash, it's an ancient technique that works with most sites.. I never really had a problem with the search apart from very short terms & numbers.. it has been a point of concern, but it seems to be working fine now. I find the results from google are often annoying as they index the lofiversion & often pull stuff up that is extremely ancient & irrelevant, not to mention in the wrong view format (for my taste). As for a choice of search query types.. well I may be an obvious candidate, using the search here a lot, but I for one would love that. Hereby shouting up! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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