EinAstonINARO

One thing that has always sucked about twitter is how if you search for words it'll show people with those words in their display name. So if I search "Combo Breaker" I get random tweets from people who are going there, like about what they ate for lunch or the anime they're watching.

hey everyone! we want to welcome all of the new folks trying out cohost. these patch notes are a bit delayed, but we’ve been having A Time over here. jae spent all of last week moving north from florida, which made it the perfect time for a lot of new folks to show up and expose operations problems we need to fix! nothing like handling downtime from a rest stop in north carolina.

here’s what’s not new since last post: eggbug real! between now and march 4th the eggbug plush will be available over on makeship’s site.

here’s what is new:

• fixed an availability issue caused by slow dashboard/notification page loads.
  • the dashboard and notifications pages both rely on doing work in the background to precompute the things you can see on them; if the data hasn’t already been computed, the page kicks off a task to compute it.
  • foolishly, when we were first implementing this, we figured that there was no pressing need to make sure only one of these tasks was running at a time, because one of them would finish “pretty quickly” and we wouldn’t have to worry about running it at all for a while.
  • this turned out not to be true; it was very easy for a frustrated user trying to cope with a slow page load to kick off a dozen of them faster than any could be finished, bottlenecking the entire site, and this became a more common event the more active users we have who are new, or returning after an absence.
  • we’ve gone back and fixed this design, so page loads while one of these tasks is running will wait for the existing task to complete rather than creating an entirely new one.
  • note that the tasks themselves are still too slow, and you may still get timeout errors (”no response received after 10,000ms” or similar) when trying to load these pages. once the background task completes, however — generally within 20 or 30 seconds — you’ll be able to see the page normally. we’re aware this is still a bad experience, and are already working on a better “loading screen”. we’re also planning to improve the performance of rebuilding the feed itself as soon as we can.