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Caching Experiment

Mark.J

Administrator
Staff member
ISPreview Team
I'm running a bit of an experiment across our news and forum system today, which involves a tweak to PHP caching. In theory this should speed everything up by quite a lot, but it may also cause the odd error or bug. Feedback would be welcome, but the site should get faster as the day progresses.

I do think it's working well though as we have a high visitor count today and yet server load is below normal.
 
Small update. Traffic today is now very heavy, but server load is currently about 0.6 - 0.7. This is well below what I'd normally expect to see for so many active visitors. So far no bugs, but it's early days, and I've got a lot of breaking experiments to run.
 
It does seem more snappier than normal today Mark. (y)
 
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Mark, any chance you can investigate the video ads you are running?

They are crashing web browsers on a number of our office machines and have done for a few weeks, resulting in some machines freezing.
 
Mark, any chance you can investigate the video ads you are running?

They are crashing web browsers on a number of our office machines and have done for a few weeks, resulting in some machines freezing.
That's a discussion for a different topic, not this one. But I really need detailed bug reports for that, like what browsers (versions etc.), computer system etc. - as I don't run the ad network itself and have to feedback.

I am aware of a bug that caused refreshing on Safari browsers a few months back, but I think we found and tackled the cause (replication of a code tag). At least when I asked those who had given feedback to test again, they didn't report any issues.
 
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I've finished the experiment and testing. The change is now deployed site-wide.
 
I probably cant provide useful feedback on performance as ispreview has always been fast for me. I will reply here if I notice breakages.

Guessing it is opcache? :)
 
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First issue I noticed. I can't get some posts to be marked as "read". I had a few on the ISP Discussion forum. I retried visiting them and most were eventully marked as read. But this one remains unread even after multiple visits:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/how-long-for-openreach-fttp-once-laid.38751/

1699602718384.webp
 
I don't think that's the PHP cache change, it's an issue with XenForo that I've noticed before. Happens to me too, and it's one of those tricky ones that may have more to do with specific browser interactions, cookies, sessions and the like.
 
I don't think that's the PHP cache change, it's an issue with XenForo that I've noticed before. Happens to me too, and it's one of those tricky ones that may have more to do with specific browser interactions, cookies, sessions and the like.
Not seen it before and I tend to mark all posts as read so I know which ones are new when I come back. The mark as read button works though, so I will use that.
 
I probably cant provide useful feedback on performance as ispreview has always been fast for me. I will reply here if I notice breakages.

Guessing it is opcache? :)
Partly correct. We had opcache before, but it turns out that to harness it properly on this server I had to use some specific settings that I hadn't previously set in order to change the defaults (i.e. before it was only being applied in a very limited way).

On top of that, the JIT (Just In Time) compilation added fully in PHP8 wasn't enabled properly due to a security setting, so after a bit of back and forth between the hosting company we resolved that.

I've also added a preload routine to the news system (forum can't do this, sadly), which just pre-creates the cache for articles rather than dynamically. The combination of all three changes makes a big difference.
 
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Not seen it before and I tend to mark all posts as read so I know which ones are new when I come back. The mark as read button works though, so I will use that.
It's a bit sporadic like that. If you clear the stuck unread topic(s) manually, then it tends not to return for a while.
 
Maybe not directly linked to this experiment Mark but has anyone reported any issues with forum alerts?

I was tagged (if that's the correct term) in this post this morning - https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/samsung-galaxy-unpacked-live-stream.39291/post-330316 - which, historically at least, would result in the bell icon going red and a notification.

That said I didn't get an alert this morning and only realised I'd been tagged when I checked the threat itself. Maybe a 'blip' ?
 
Same sort of area as the 'Mark as Read' issue, when it comes to cookies and sessions, which can vary depending on browser settings and all sorts of things. I put them more down to XenForo core issues.
 
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