• 17 September 2015Today's update : Optimizing the Study page

    The website has been updated today with changes that should improve the loading times of the Study pages.

    The Shared Stories list on the study pages is now cached. I have set the "lifetime" of cached stories initially as low as one hour. So eg. if you share a new story, or upvote someone else's story, it may take up to an hour to be reflected in the page. Update: it may take several hours, up to a day to notice a difference because the cache is very conservative atm (probably too much) .

    This is obviously a usability problem. How do you signal to users that the content is not immediately updated, but will be eventually? It's not ideal, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. It's not critical for votes, reports, and shared stories to be reflected in real time on the website, and this saves a lot of unnecessary queries on the database.

    I will keep an eye on just how many pages are cached, based on the user activity, and then increase gradually the effect of the cache until it provides a significant speed improvement. In theory, updating the Shared Stories list even just once a day should provide more significant gains. But I wanted to think about how that is going to work usability wise so I will finetune it over time.

    Since the website has been entirely upgraded to a more complete framework, there may be a few bugs that slipped through my tests. These should be very easy to fix. If you find an issue please let me know and I will fix it asap.

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