Admin: Chat Optimisation [Completed]

[HendryTan]

1. The chat will be going up & down, starting now and extend over the next few days.

We are doing some optimisation to the chat feature.

2. Chat is very popular with our readers and is our LARGEST resource hog.

3. If this optimisation is successful, we hope to make BW server more resource efficient and the chat more responsive too.

4. Thanks for the understanding.

Cheers !

Hendry Tan

Admin cum Moderator

[HendryTan]

1. We have done tuning of our popular the chat service.

2. We believe this will result in:

a. Chat will be more Responsive especially during peak hours at night.

b. Chat now consumes LESSER resources which will allow the main forum to be more responsive.

3. So what gives, especially we did NOT add hardware ?

We have changed chat such that it now temporary writes your chat to RAM and only batch write any unsent chat-messages to harddisk 30 minutes later. This reduces disk write dramatically.

But this means that whenever there is "unscheduled" reboot of our server (rare), a few of your last UN-read chat messages could be "loss" as it is no more in harddisk.

Secondly the Chat-Configurations (most people don't use) which you may have changed in the last 30 minutes prior to reboot could also be forgotten.

4. We believe these are compromises that readers can live with in exchange of a more responsiveness forum and chat service.

5. Please provide bug reports (if any) here.

Happy chatting !

Cheers !

BW Admin Team