OFFICIAL "SERVER PROBLEMS" THREAD

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by James Heinrich

Which probably sounds more conservative than it is: I assume this is a 12-thread CPU and that it's (on average) running one core pretty close to full while most of it sits idle?

It's a dual CPU system... each CPU is quad core and hyperthreaded, so 16 cores total (or 8 if you're a purist and frown upon calling hyperthreads a "real core").

EDIT: It's a pretty even distribution of work amongst the cores. There are probably times when a single PHP thread could spike, but SQL will spread the load, and PHP itself spawns multiple threads to handle requests, even if a single request doesn't multithread.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by tha

Can we have the vertical axis of the chart of the server activity set to absolute, in other words with zero at the base? I like to use graphs by looking at the graph rather than having to visualise it myself by looking at the axis first and then transpose the graph.

I considered that, but having the zero point on the y-axis leaves a lot of dead space, and only being 120px high it would lose some granularity. I guess it could be made logarithmic but that might be more confusing.

[TheMawn]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

I considered that, but having the zero point on the y-axis leaves a lot of dead space, and only being 120px high it would lose some granularity. I guess it could be made logarithmic but that might be more confusing.

I agree on all counts.

[James Heinrich]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

I considered that, but having the zero point on the y-axis leaves a lot of dead space, and only being 120px high it would lose some granularity. I guess it could be made logarithmic but that might be more confusing.

Then make it taller?
But seriously, if Y-range is currently 100-500, locking it to 0-500 wouldn't make a huge difference in the graph presentation. Would be more than made up by increasing the graph height from 120px to 150px.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by James Heinrich

Then make it taller?
But seriously, if Y-range is currently 100-500, locking it to 0-500 wouldn't make a huge difference in the graph presentation. Would be more than made up by increasing the graph height from 120px to 150px.

It could be taller. I just stuck with the dimensions of the old image chart. :)

And of course right now the new graph is broken because of the missing data from a few days back now causing errors in the processing of the stats. Fooey.

I guess it needs a check to see if there's actually any data for a certain time period. Funny that it didn't seem to care when the missing data was in the middle of the past 7 days, but now that it's at the beginning, it cares... it cares a lot.

EDIT: I "fixed" it for now.... just told it to grab the last 145 hours of data instead of 168. :)

[retina]

Originally Posted by James Heinrich

... upgraded [sic] from image charts to JS charts.

Oh dear. I don't know what extra functionality the JS is supposed to add but I do hope that it is really really useful and really really necessary. At least I hope the reason is more than it being merely a vehicle for Google to show off how clever their APIs can be. I often think that many websites feel compelled to make their pages ever more "clever" while reducing usability and increasing complexity (not to mention requiring users to keep there browsers open to exploits) with the mistaken belief that users won't want content unless it looks pretty also.

BTW: My remark is directed at Google and similar such places that decide to deprecate things like simple PNG images because they are boring.

[sorry][/offtopic][/sorry]

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by retina

Oh dear. I don't know what extra functionality the JS is supposed to add but I do hope that it is really really useful and really really necessary. At least I hope the reason is more than it being merely a vehicle for Google to show off how clever their APIs can be. I often think that many websites feel compelled to make their pages ever more "clever" while reducing usability and increasing complexity (not to mention requiring users to keep there browsers open to exploits) with the mistaken belief that users won't want content unless it looks pretty also.

BTW: My remark is directed at Google and similar such places that decide to deprecate things like simple PNG images because they are boring.

[sorry][/offtopic][/sorry]

It's a big fat java world we live in my friend.

I honestly don't know why Google deprecated the image charts. It was kind of nice to just pass a big ugly URL and get an image back, but that only gets you so far. What if you're passing in lots of data, exceeding the max length of a URI. For simple graphs with a limited set of data to chart, it was fine.

If you're showing multiple charts and graphs like the user stats page, you can load the JS once and then make several calls to generate the data so it does speed things up in those cases, presumably.

I think the "jsapi" it loads is also used by other API's on the Google side of things, not just charts. I haven't messed with many so I'm guessing.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by tha

It is certainly noticable when interacting with the server, not just the response time, but also the reliability.

Google thinks so too. Their webmaster tools shows the time it takes their bots to crawl the page. See if you can pick out when the old server was retired.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

Google thinks so too. Their webmaster tools shows the time it takes their bots to crawl the page. See if you can pick out when the old server was retired.

:Applause_Applause:

:Sincerely:

[Madpoo]

So, I've been monkeying around with the site layout in my spare time.

We thought it might be informative to get some feedback on a few design changes, see what sticks.

So far it's just the home page layout. Everything is functional but once you navigate away from this special home page, you'll see the old layout.

http://www.mersenne.org/default.mock.php

You'll know you're on the mock-up page because I've replaced our good friend Marin Mersenne with someone else. The story on that was, I was looking at Google image results for Mersenne and that one came up.

We're looking for feedback at this point, although to be honest it's one of those things where *everyone* is going to have an opinion about how the site *should* be done if it were up to them. I'm more curious to get some ideas from the people who use the site about a few specific things.

First: The colors of the left-hand menus. "Garish" was the word that came to my mind, but maybe folks like the high contrast.

Centering the page in the browser: Good, bad, indifferent? It's one of those things that everyone does these days... pages that don't tend to look weird to me.

Removing the "Newest users" section on the right hand side: It took up some valuable "above the fold" screen real estate, and I'm not really sure if people paid much mind to it. Does an up to date list of the newest 26 users to sign up matter much? It could be relocated, maybe below the left-hand nav or something.

The on page "Google Translate" section plus the links to the human translations for certain languages. For this one, it might make sense to have it on the left-nav, but it wouldn't be as visible as in the banner section, but unfortunately I don't have any measurements on how much it's used so it's hard to say where would be best. Anyone coming to the page who doesn't know English that well is probably going to look up top first since that's where people put stuff like that, but it's kind of bulky. Maybe a smaller version of the button would work.

Menus on the left, or perhaps across the top, just below the banner section?

And for any real web designers out there, go easy on me, I had to learn some very basic things about CSS and HTML. Last web page I designed was probably with Frontpage more than a decade ago, and I've only dabbled here and there since then.

It probably needs a fair amount of "pixel polish" to get some alignments squared away, but I didn't want to grind on the details until I thought the overall design seemed good enough to run with.

[srow7]

We thought it might be informative to get some feedback on a few design changes, see what sticks.

can you put back UTC time
dont care where