Performance Improvement – Possible Side Effects

I have discovered an area of the DearDiary code that is hopelessly inefficient, and that is the area that generates the diary Indexes – that’s to say, either the calendar listing or the ‘long listing’ of your entries. To cut a long story hopefully somewhat shorter, the code would ask for ALL entry data from the database for that diary, possibly stretching back of DD’s 6 year history, even if it was only going to display the last 3 months of it. As you can imagine, for the busy diaries with lots of entries, this is pretty awful.

I have adjusted the query to limit the number of entries that DD will look for to 150. This is a hard coded ‘magic number’ which is a coding practise I hate but it is nothing more than a sticky plaster to hopefully Band Aid a somewhat sluggishly performing server of late. This whole area is being radically redesigned at the moment anyway so it’s a temporary fix.

It does possibly mean that your Diary Index isn’t showing you all the months you expected – or appears to have missing entries. There may be side effects to this that I haven’t considered – so if you think you’re experiencing weirdness with your Calendar or some entries aren’t appearing properly on your Index or Welcome page, please drop me a note. I shall try to set the ‘magic number’ at a level where I don’t think anyone will be affected but still give the database server half a chance of sending everything out 🙂

Thanks for your patience,
Steve.

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4 Comments

  1. You know what’s amazing to me? You understand all this! I just sit here reading, and nodding my head wisely, and hoping some of your knowledge and expertise will sort of rub off on me.

    Thanks again for you work!

    Hugs,
    Ani

    PS: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, a Kwality Kwansa, a Satisfying Saturnalia, and a Yowza of a New Year!

  2. It’s been 6 years for real? I was just guessing around when I figured I started here a little over 5 years ago. But wow.

    Have fun with your index issue. I didn’t really notice any slowness.

  3. I was in my old diary here that’s private now but it should go back to like 2000 but it doesn’t. It goes back to 02 and I quit writing there in 03 so I don’t know if that’s anything to do with your adjusting that whole diary thing or not.

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