World: r3wp

I'll set you up a second account for testing Graham.

48 seconds to post a PM to Sunanda :(

I also have a fairly large private messages file.

Try with someone who does not -- say a Hello message to a new member.

2 minutes to send "ok" to Gregg.

It only takes 1.2 seconds for light to travel from earth to the moon!

I have maybe 30 private messages in total, if you want to check

That suggests Gregg is on Venus.

lol

AltME is REALLY REALLY slow for me.

Sunanda is from Mars

What's the problem .. flat files?

its become slow for everyone.  is it time to start up a new world... 
or update the server its running on?

PM 100 seconds to Izkata

if we do make a new world, I'd name it differently than just going 
to rebol4... its misleading.

so it doesn't seem to mean a PM message store issue

Debugging without the source is a little silly

Very slow for me right now. Inconsistently so though. I doubt it's 
flat files at fault. I think it's the sync/diff/publish model that 
doesn't scale. Only a guess since I don't have the code.

What's wrong with Rebol4?  It'll keep all the worlds in alphabetical 
order!

I think when people PM it bogs down the whole server throughput, 
cause its effectively sending MBs of data through the net.

or is it?

maybe use Git as the basis for a new chat system

the number at the end gives the impression that its a world to speak 
about that version of rebol.

the R3 chat architecture is VERY nice... it just needs a GUI client.

We could rename to somethin like REBOL-Darknet or something, which 
makes it more interesting to people.

I was going to propose  REBOL-devnet   :-)

I'm cool with that too.

how about Rebol-and-no-trolls-world

lol

Well, I'd imagine that this is a major problem for Altme ... so Carl 
will want to fix it.

After all there are some people paying for worlds ...

But IOS messenger never got fixed .. so maybe it won't :(

My paid (not hosted) worlds aren't affected by this.

because you don't have enough messages

I just tried sending Gregg a PM on REBOL-gate.

REBOL-gate is a tiny world that runs on the same server as REBOL3.
The PM took under a second.
That suggests world-size scaling is the issue to focus on.

Exactly

NetLImiter won't show stats for me right now, so I don't know what 
AltMe does in that regard. I also can't just the R3 chat architecture, 
but the CLI for it isn't terribly intuitive to me.

Yes, Graham, my point is that I don't think this will be a priority 
for RT to address unless a hosted client has a big world.

I've just asked Carl to help in maintaining Altme in another comm 
channel... hopefully he'll see that and reply to me in a not to distant 
future.

IMO the fix is simple. Use a database as backend. Never understood 
why this step is so hard to do. Even with 1 Mio. messages you won't 
feel a slow down.

So, db on both servers and clients?

Interesting, why use a DB and add bloat, why not just write just 
enough code to keep it fast?
For example, loading in messages in groups of 100....

That's essentially the data structure we use in the archive at REBOL.org, 
Reichart.

Works fast and has scaled so far -- with nearly 150,000 posts from 
this world:
   http://www.rebol.org/aga-groups-index.r?world=r3wp

Graham, yep, that's how I would solve it.


Reichart, well, 250KB for SQLite is not that much bloat IMO and supports 
full-text searching as well.

I love AltMe, but it has things that annoy me as well. Since we don't 
know exactly why it doesn't scale (yes, we can guess), I don't think 
just making the back end a DB is a guaranteed fix, or perhaps even 
that simple. And I don't think it will happen. I fear the R3 chat/rebdev/??? 
model will scale even worse than AltMe as I think the msg db is a 
single file and still a naive implementation designed for small-scale 
use.


Like Graham, I've thought that something like Git--a system designed 
for distributed, differenced, repositories of information--might 
be used. I haven't seen it done however.

What ar our options?

1) Live with AltMe, and roll worlds when they get too slow.
2) Find an alternative.
3) Implement our own.

Is #1 painful enough to drive us to #2 or #3?

Nice analysis, Gregg.

This worls has lasted six years [started dec-2004], so #1 is annoying, 
but not too painful.

I'd rather have 10 years or whatever in one database and not mulitple 
worlds as one wears out

Suggesting an answer is pointless without knowing the issues .. so, 
I'd go for #3

actually the r3 chat system *client* is still pretty simple... but 
the way messages are managed via the server seems to be much more 
flexible.  every msg and file is its own single item.  they are downloaded 
as items, not as groups of items.


so actually, all that needs to be done to make r3 chat scale is to 
improve how it stores its messages on disk and on RAM.   


the fact that the server supports moderation, threads, user levels, 
files, and things like item re-classification is very nice.


really, all it needs is a gui client.... that's If the server is 
able to respond quickly to requests.

though I don't think it supports "private until approved" moderation.

though I'm sure its possible to rewire how Altme message passing 
works.  as long as the server has the data and client/server are 
using the same message protocol, everything can be changed.


it can even be retro-fitted on update, to prevent people from having 
to download the whole world again, since we already have the data 
on our disks.