Loading big forums

Recently I tried to load a big forum. I had several times a 503, service unavailable code.

Least but first of all, as a software engineer, it is beautiful when you have a standard page for those html error codes.

Loading of those big forums is very difficult, probably because the whole thread is sent over the network. That becomes huge. But who is interested in the whole forum? Most likely in the last three pages at a max and maybe in the first page to see how it all started. If you keep a record of requests of pages, then must you be able to see a pattern in this behaviour.

So why not change the behaviour what a forum returns when it gets over a certain size and return more inline with the expected behaviour of people? Then could you send not the whole forum, but only some chunks of lets say for instance 10 pages each. Every first time someone requests a forum you might send the first three pages and the last seven. I expect that that will do in 99% of all requests for people.

Saves a lot of waiting time for the client and sends much less data accross the network. Might have a positive effect on the performance and availability of the servers too.

That's strange1

I think most people here don't understand what you're talking about

@macer75: This forum is here to give the staff of chess.com feedback and provide them with suggestions to enhance the site. That is what I am trying to do.

This is a rather technical talk indeed, just hoping that the staff will make use of my idea.

I have one other thread about enhancing group views. Two of the three ideas are now implemented. That is great. I hope this will happen too with this idea.

Basically: the bigger a thread is, the slower it loads. That does not have to happen. You don't have to load the complete thread. If a thread has sixteen pages, do you want to take a look at all pages or only at the last two or three pages? I guess the latter. So, if you only send the last pages of a thread cross the line, pages will load faster.

Google isn't returning a lot of pages when a search request has million of results. Search engines know how many pages people are looking for. Chess.com can do the same.

This just a pet peeve, but I am seeing it more and more often...

This is not a "forum".  This is a post.  The entire "Site Feedback and Suggestions" group of postings...that is a forum. 

A post contains a single discussion, a forum contains (and provides a platform for) multiple related discussions.

No problem, thanks for the reminder. I see that I make that mistake a lot of times here. Normally do I call those things threads. Not forums, nor posts. My first contribution is the forum topic and is a post. I call the collection of posts a thread.

I don't know the expression pet peeve. I had to look for it in a dictionairy and I still don't know what it is exactly. I think that it is something like 'recurrent irritation', but then informal language. In Dutch we might say 'he is back in his element'.

I wonder however if this is the good place to post your pet peeve. Where will your post be most influential? Is that this forum/thread/post?

No, which is why I had also copied it and posted in the General Discussion forum :).  I can remove my post here if you want, but that could be confusing now that we've discussed it...

Your definition of pet peeve is accurate, however, I do want to mention that pet peeve is used as a softer way of saying "recurring annoyance", because when someone says it is their own "pet peeve", they are also implying that it is their own issue that they become annoyed by it, so as not to offend the other party as much ;)...it's like the difference between saying "you are annoying me" and "that thing/behavior annoys me; sorry, it's not you personally, it has just always annoyed me".

@markgravitygood: Haha, no I am not at Microsoft.

Take a look at the time threads load. The bigger the slower. That has to do with the information send accross the network.

FYI, I use postgresql and my OS is Debian.

Please, don't remove. It is ok.

I understood from the translations that it is friendly.

You are welcome. :-)

@markgravitygood: you are right that the performance ought to be better after the initial roundtrip if the information would have been cached client side.

The load time of a thread correlates with the size of the thread. That is why I concluded that the query can't be the cause. Maybe is it in between and has it to do with the processing of the information after the query and before the transmission of data.

Like checking if all data of closed accounts is removed correctly. And that that is happening with every request again, because there are so many accounts closed all the time. It is impossible for that to cache. Which might be another reason why information is not cached client side.

This thread has been viewed 337 times by now. I think it will be read.

It is totally different if chess.com will actually do something with it. It is only a suggestion.

@RatDogFriday: did you change your UN?