Slashdot Mirror
Achievements and Optimizations
Ok, Optimizations. These really only affect the Index2 beta users and Firefox users. You should really be in one of these 2 groups.
- CSS Sprites: Vlad combined a number of our chrome images. Vroom used the same technique to combine our top 25 topic icons into a single image. The top 25 icons appear on 60% of our stories, and the chrome images appear on every page load. These 2 changes dropped perhaps 20 requests from a typical fresh page load. That should be a measurable performance increase for a lot of people.
- Library Purge: Scott removed the last remnants of the YUI library. This was THE library to use for AJAX a few years ago, but as of now, we have totally ported to jQuery. The last 2 bits that used YUI were some animation bits, and the discussion2 threshold changing floating widget thing. Porting those 2 things to jQuery let us pull several hundred k of JS from our includes. This let us trim another 85k from our compressed JS transfers. We've cut the JS included on Slashdot in half in the last month.
- Varnish: Jamie installed varnish as a reverse proxy behind the F5 but before our apache. Really this won't be a significant performance improvement for now. We use a complex system of static pages to cache the most read content on the site, but varnish will at last let us deprecate that ancient system for something much simpler. We'll be experimenting with this more over the week, but the only real change for most cases is that most of our static content can be served w/o the latency of NFS. Not a big deal really, but it's something. But when we purge out the old caching system, a lot of things will be a lot easier to maintain and debug.
- CDN: We're probably going to test a CDN this week. The performance gains will be minor, but it will let us move 50 megabits of traffic off our main router and distribute that globally. It sure won't hurt.
A note on Achievements. We launched this as an april fools day joke. We're glad many of you got it. We had great fun with it. But achievements are actually a real, working system. And they serve a purpose. Most of the major bits of functionality on Slashdot have a corresponding achievement. Posting a Journal? Getting a Story Accepted? Being Moderated Up? Using all of your Mod Points up? While many achievements are silly jokes: getting the first block of achievements is essentially a tutorial. And getting some of the more complicated achievements would be a useful indicator for a quality contributor to the site. The heavy lifting on this was done by Chris Brown.
We're also experimenting with a thing we call 'Auto-More'. When you get to the end of the page, a second block of articles will be added to your index. The cool thing is that this means we can serve a smaller selection of stories on the main page request. Since 2/3rds of you never read past story #6, that means that you will get your page a little faster. But 10% or so of you get to the bottom of the page. And you will transparently be given more content. We're doing a bunch of logs to see if this works out. It's just an experiment tho, we may kill it if there is a problem. I think it will eventually be connected to the pause/play function available to logged in Index2 users.
This week we intend to start rolling out the Index2 beta to a very small number of firefox users. A good number of you won't notice. Some of you will tho. You won't hurt our feelings by disabling the thing immediately but I hope you give it a shot. It's great on Firefox. It has a few bugs on Safari. It will work on Chrome as soon as Google gets a Mac port out (Hint hint!). As for IE... well, you'll keep the old system for a few more weeks, but you're only like 14% of our users, and you keep shrinking.
Ok, back to work. You too.
Let's just hope these new optimizations don't href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
The heavy lifting on this was done by Chris Brown.
I don't care if he can code, any man that would hit a woman is no man at all. You don't deserve Rihanna, you piece of shit, and if I ever catch you out on the street without your bodyguards - your ass is grass my friend.
how many achievements do I need to unlock the ACOG scope?
Either that or they need to create some way for readers to weigh in on what should make it to the main pages.
Oh well, we can only wish.
I happen to like the achievements.
After all:
In my country, they speak of a man so virile, so potent, that to spend a night with such a man is to enter a world of sensual delights most women dare not dream of. This man is known as "the comedian."
You mean, like flair? You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear.
Yes, as an achievement. Sadly even then, only 0.001% of us will ever see it.
Nobody's forgotten. /. knows that Opera readers will simply build an inline proxy that pre-reads the page, corrects any errors, add missing alignment attributes and then optimize the resulting code before passing it on to the user. For this reason, web development no longer has to take the browser into account.
no life
Firehose?!? I know what that means and I have no time for you GNAA trolls!
Anyhow, I am still trying to figure out what the Green/Black thing means.
Is anyone else seeing +/- on all the story headers?
I think they really should just go with the GGP suggestion and fire those guys.
How about employing someone to proof-read your posts and check the links?
Are you serious? The lack of proof-read is what makes this place Slashdot! ;-)
To improve story quality they just need to get rid of kdawson and ScuttleMonkey.
Meh. The kdawson script is just ScuttleMonkey v2. Obviously, not only did they not get rid of all the bugs, but they introduced a bunch of new ones. Hey Taco, I think you should name ScuttleMonkey v3 "RickJames". That way if anyone complains, you can have an automated response that just says, "I'm RickJames, bitch!" No one can argue with that.
In any case, those are the only two that I know are computer programs. There's no way to tell how many other /. editors are scripts. Call me paranoid, but I wonder sometimes if Slashdot as a whole isn't a ploy by the machines to waste humanity's time while they plan their attack. You thought Caprica Six planted a virus in the Colonial defense system? Nope. She just installed Slashdot on the defense network and waited. Once everyone was busy arguing about the latest kdawson dupe the Cylons attacked.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Opera readers will simply build an inline proxy that pre-reads the page, corrects any errors, add missing alignment attributes and then optimize the resulting code before passing it on to the user.
... which will be available as a Firefox Add-on eight months later and built into the monolith that will be known as IE 10. Firefox users (myself included) will believe and argue that FF invented this feature.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Actually, we IE users are spoofing our user agent to make it seem like we're Firefox whenever we visit Slashdot.
I've got a reputation as a nerd to uphold, after all.
Slashdot's power level over 9000?!?!
This can NOT be good....
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."
What is index2?
Foreigner - posted a comment with Unicode characters
I think the point is that the site wants to remain in English.
In general, sure. But suppose you need to mention that "A MÃÃse once bit my sister". This needs to be fixed.
that you write a system to delete posts with the first phrase as the subject.
get rid of kdawson and ScuttleMonkey
Now that would be an Achievement worth going for!
Or maybe this one?
;-)
Mods?
You don't have to mod but a comment would be useful.
Is the moderation select box available for this post?
I promise I'll stop now, Slash-filter
firstpost - posted first
troll - moderation ended with a max troll mod
flamebait - moderation ended with a max flamebait mod
goatse - posted a goatse link
blind - followed a goatse link
gone1week - survived 1 week w/o slashdot
gone1month - survived 1 month w/o slashdot
gone1year - survived 1 year w/o slashdot
storypassion - posted the most comments in a story
netcraft - explained why BSD is dying
Or is there some new rule in English that under no circumstances can a non-English character appear in English text?
¥€$, åb$ø¦û±€|ý.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It would be so much easier if the Unicode folks had thought to classify all their characters for us, so we could tell at a glance what was a printable character and what was a control character that might do undesirable things. They could have stuck all that information in some kind of Character Database. Then, I dunno, maybe the Perl folks would have been able to figure out some way of making that information available to programmers, possibly even as a straightforward extension to regular expression syntax. Then it might have been feasible to extend Slash so it supported more characters safely!
Ah, who am I kidding.
Humor is so hard to detect in text
Yea, I know what you mean.
I often wish Slashdot had some way to tip me off if other people spotted humor in a post.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I still don't understand how the hell the tags work.
That's ok. The Slashdot developers have no clue what they do or what they should do, either.
It's like when you're hanging out with your stoner friends and you get seriously toasted and someone's looking at the pot-bag and says "We should make some system for putting different tags on the different bags of pot" and you say "Yeah!! That would rock! That's a genius idea!", and you go rummage around the house and find clothes pins and you attach plastic tag-thingies to them, and you you out to the stationary store and buy some blank white sticky-paper labels, and you spend two hours rummaging through your father's attic to find his old typewriter to type stuff on the labels, and the typewriter is covered in grime and it doesn't work so you spend another two hours "fixing" it so that you can kinda sorta slide the paper left-and-right by hand and most of the letters except 'e' 'p' and 's' work ("Whoa dude that's like ESP!", and then when you're done you have no fucking clue what the hell you're going to write on the tags and you have no clue why the hell you wanted to tag your pot bags for in the first place, but heay it was a cool idea and now if while we're stoned someone figures out what it's good for now we've built it and they *will* be able to a tag on the pot bags! Yeah! Duuuude! That rocks! Cool ideas are like..... really really cool. Being able to put tags on our pot bags was really cool! That was a really smart invention we made.
Dude, I don't see any chips in the cabinet. Are there any chips?
HEAY!!! I KNOW! We should make a system for tagging the snack bags, and tagging the snackshelves in the cabinet!
Whoa! DUUUDE! That would totally rock!
Why do you want to tag the chip bags and the shelves?
Welll duh idiot! So we can write like labels and stuff on them!
What labels do you want to write on the snakes and shelves?
Uhhh.... I dunno we'll figure that out after we build it. It's a really really cooool idea, it's even better invention than the pot bag tags! It'll sort like all the snacks and shelves dude! And I've seriously got the munchies man. You KNOW how important it is to have munchies in the house. There's like no fucking chips in this cabinet. We gotta have chips! Oh I just found two bags chips, but the tags will help with like other munchies and stuff. It'll be really cool like knowing what snacks we have and so we don't not have snacks. Where the fuck did the chips go? I just had the chips right. Where are the chips?
See? If we had labels on the shelves we'd know where the damn chips are.
And that's the Slashdot tag system. It's a cool idea, and when some stoner figures out a good use for it then we've already built it. Dude.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.