World: r3wp

Bug: I just posted in Core group. There was a delay before the message 
was echoed back to me, so before that happened I switched to another 
group to continue reading. Then I switched back to Core, and found 
my message echoed properly. However, my message was still in the 
New message text entry area.

Damn, it just happened again with this message.

Anton, connection problems?

Yes, slow satellite connection, especially at this time of day. Nevertheless, 
AltME should not behave this way.

Altme is getting exeedingly slow in posting messages ... is this 
a network issue or some type of inherent lack of scalability?

testing....

about 5 seconds for a post for me. not slower than usual.

Graham -- please try an experiment:
-- Hop over to rebol-gate [id: guest password: guest]
-- Make a few posts in the Playpen group

rebol-gate is a tiny world, so it may help pinpoint if the problem 
is a world scaling issue.

Chris is reporting 30 seconds

but it varies throughout the day

rebol-gate is instant

Thanks. 

That's useful evidence that the problem is not network or server 
related [rebol3 and rebol-gate run on the same server]


Next step ---  is it better or worse in groups with many messages? 
(ie is the problem the world or the group):

--could you try a test post or two in a couple of groups that have 
less than 100 posts?
  list available here: http://www.rebol.org/aga-index.r

I was sending messages to chris here .. and they were taking 30 seconds 
too

-- Do you have a _lot_ of private messages between you and Chris?

-- Do you see similar delays when private messaging with other members 
of this world?

[It could be that the private message distribution process is affected, 
while the broadcast of public messages is  not]

i think it's time dependent

Thanks. That suggests the server running this world gets overloaded 
at times.

let me see how long this takes to post

3 secs

but 7 seconds to send a private message

a simple load indication from the server could tell something

private messages are single HUGE bin for every user.

so if you've PM many times in the past with anyone, it all adds up. 
 this *is* a design issue.

some groups also have started to become rather slow (the view group, 
for example)

Hmm, so if Graham rejoined as GChiu (say) he'd have an empty private 
message set, and his messaging would be fast again....

....Sounds like a good justification for a second account for a prolific 
member of a busy world.

....Or for AltME to provide a purging mechanism for old private messages.

(If the private message slowdown is true, that is.)

it is... I've discussed it directly with Carl  :-)

Did you test it as well?

discussion != empirics

yes.  I often create private groups to chat with people so its not 
mind-bogling slow.

Well, I guess someone should then revamp the storage mechanism.

Altme should really be released open source so we can fix these things.

My whole REBOL3 world data is a mere 62M on disk. Any noticeable 
slowdown occurring for this puny amount of data is somewhat .... 
surprising, to stay polite.

it has to transfer & update large blocks, which is where I guess 
the slowdown is...

Well, it surely does not post back the whole chatset just for adding 
a single message ...

But maybe it does :) Who knows but Carl and those who wrote it :)

that would be carl too  ;-)

It'd be interesting to know the size of Graham's private messages 
file  -- 19.set in his case.  {Andreas, yours would be 107.set]

The files should be in altme/worlds/rebol3/chat

But beware that Windows may be virtualising the files, so the latest 
copy may be well hidden elsewhere,

It seems there's noone who wrote altme ... it just came from the 
outer space :-)

My private messages file is 384K.

Mine is 1.6meg. I suspect Graham can top that!

3 523 969 bytes :-)

I am a politician - I do many behind-the-scenes activity :-)

4.5MB here.

That's large, Maxim.

For comparison, the largest public,active, group is Core -- I see 
that as 3.8 meg in size.

yes... and its why I PM so little now.  its just painfull.

this group is < 1 sec.   PM sometimes even causes my altme to go 
into "internet busy" mode for so long, I loose track of the discussion.

I can see one larger group....REBOL3-old was 4.3meg.

And that was retired and replaced by the REBOL3 precisely because 
of the speed problem.

Doesn't the speed also have to do with the message limit per chat 
settings? I've decreased mine and  it's much faster. Though I do 
wonder how accurate that setting is or what it really measures. I 
set mine to a higher number after a search and warning that it needs 
to be set higher. I've thought that there's no way there could be 
that many messages (several 1000's) in that one topic.

it just limits what is visible in your scrollable view above.   it 
will affect speed so much as it uses less faces to display the list 
and thus less RAM is managed by the GC.

Yeah, I guess I should just search the data directly when I'm looking 
for something really old.