Camen Design Forum

Scalability

append delete Adam S.

So I finally got around to watching Kroc's speech. I'm really interested in NNF, but I do wonder about scalability. Is anyone running this on a highly active site?

I'm concerned that there doesn't appear to be atomic updating of the RSS files. That seems like a major problem begging for collision if traffic is sizeable. Ideally, the RSS feed should be created uniquely, like, say: 

%
$cachefile = @ip2long($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).".tmp"; // whatever, something unique
file_put_contents($cachefile,$rss); // dump the new contents to a file
rename($cachefile,$threadrss);  // atomic rename
%

Also, if the forum got really large, performance seems like a potential issue, both with a large number of threads and a large number of posts in a thread.

So my question is: is anyone using this on a forum that gets a lot of traffic? I'm legitimately wondering how this would perform if a forum was updated multiple times per second.

Kroc added on

This should be fixed now?

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append delete #1. Adam S

Append doesn't appear to be working.

append delete #2. Kroc

“Is anyone running this on a highly active site?”

Not that I’m aware of, no, and I highly doubt it. Why would they?
You couldn't use NNF on a massively active forum like minecraftforum.net simply because you couldn’t keep up with the spam and trolls, there's not enough administration tools and protection.

NNF uses locking for all RSS writes so that data shouldn't get lost. This means that if you were to get hundreds of writes to a feed a second then that thread would slow down whilst everybody waits in a queue for their write. But this is writes, not reads—how likely is it a thread is going to get hundreds of replies a second? Even 10 a second would be unlikely!

If an NNF forum got really large your problem isn’t going to be performance, it’s going to be administration. There's not even any flood control.

And either way, NNF isn't trying to solve scalability: http://camendesign.com/nononsense_forum#limits If I had tried to make a perfect forum in the beginning I would neither have a forum at all, nor have NNF. For one person to try make a forum that scales like phpBB is certain failure. I neither have the time, funding or skills alone to do it.

My goal was to talk to other people. I achieved that in three or four days and 700 lines of code.

Don’t be afraid that your technology isn’t good enough. It’s better to just try and be wrong than to try to be right from the beginning.

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